Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-01-08
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Stack ranking doesn't reward innovation
Pros: Microsoft has some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.  They have great technical challenges and I always had enough hardware and software resources to do my job.
Cons: The work culture is competitive to a fault.  The forced stack-ranking causes behaviors that undermine a collaborative innovative environment.  Every manager that tried to work around the system was replaced.  Most employees move around the company regularly and engineers who try to become deep experts are penalized.