Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-08-11
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great people in a highly political company
Pros: - Microsoft is a iconic name that still attracts young professionals.
- Looks good on resume, other companies know if you can manage the work/life balance at this company then you are no slacker.
- Pay is good for entry level but for industry hires look elsewhere
- Smart people that are experts in what they do
Cons: I can write many things here:

- Highly political company that rewards people that can play the game
  * Send bunch of email --> This shows you are working according to managers
  * Suck up to your manager --> This is how people are getting promoted
  * Do less of what is assigned to you and more of useless tools to have "impact" cross teams

- Stack ranking system with forced curve
  * Even if you have a team full of rock star engineers 1 or 2 will be getting a rating of 4, 5.
  * This system forces competition among peers rather than collaboration
  * Even if you work very hard to improve the feature/quality you are not rewarded because it's "expected".  While someone else can work 9-5 and do a silly script to automate stuff is valued

- Far too many Program managers
  * These people don't contribute less than quarter of what engineers(SDE/SDET) do
  * Great talented people that are forced into this role to do data entry


Overall: Microsoft looks very good from outside, however it's a contrast when you are inside.