Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-08-28
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Great engineering challenges, but often slow reaction times, and inconsistantly competent partner teams
Pros: Compensation is excellent and fairly transparent. Work-Life balance can vary depending on how efficient you are at your work, and of course your manager and team. There are certainly periods of intensely busy schedules. There are some extremely intelligent and technical folks here, and it's really great to be able to learn from them.
Cons: I think most folks have seen the XKCD comic comparing corporate culture across different companies - it's very true with Microsoft. Folks are very possessive about their Org's ownership of stuff, and can get in the way of work. Re-orgs seem to happen twice yearly, muddying the up-the-stack alignment.