Company: Microsoft
Date: 2008-05-25
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

A great place to end up working, after you've had your fill of startups
Pros: Reasonable work hours ("crunch" weeks are far and few between), excellent benefits (all-inclusive - no copayments even required), regional pay adjustments for cost-of-living differences (Bay Area pay was 15% higher than "standard" salaries for comparable job levels when I first joined). I've also had very good experiences with being rewarded for doing good work, in the form of stock awards, cash bonuses, and time off. Products being developed are very diverse, so there's a great opportunity to move between different technologies, markets, and even project scales (hundred-man projects down to teams of just a handful of people). The company is very stable (having been around a while).
Cons: Big company mentality - it often feels like there isn't much innovation going on, and sometimes it seems like the cards are stacked against trying to do something too new or creative. It's also a bit frustrating at times to be under the restraints of all of the antitrust suits which have been going on - cross product integration is very tightly examined to ensure there will be no legal ramnifications, down to one case where a partner team couldn't explain the format of data they were consuming to our team, because doing so would require them to document/explain it to the general public.