Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-07-27
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great people and not too much bureaucracy.
Pros: Note that this is specifically for Online Services Division and Bing Search in particular.
- very smart people
- lots of projects to work on, so technically it's possible to transition to a team you think you can be more productive. Though this is not very encouraged.
- very smart managers that don't micromanage
- modern technologies (latest versions of C#, Visual Studio and frameworks)
- huge scale that makes it possible to uncover some of the bugs in .NET/CLR itself
- separate offices!
Cons: - working on a tiny part of the huge project, doesn't help to feel ownership and limits the amount of learning
- some of the decisions are driven by politics and from the top, which leaves engineers to pay for management games
- source version control that makes it very hard to have multiple local feature branches. This noticeably decreases productivity 
- perks are very average (rare offsites to cinema, coffee machines and much appreciated foosball and pool tables), especially when comparing to Silicon Valley companies