Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-10-10
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Great People, Good Pay, Work/Life balance only ok to poor (but they were working on that as I was leaving).
Pros: #1. Smart co-workers everywhere, and you'll bond soon enough when "con #1" (below) happens.
#2. They had started working on Flexible work arrangements and it was working well.
#3. You will be challenged
#4. Some great HR and pay polices
Cons: #1 Depending on  which group you are in, the business cycle is around 3 to 4 years, you will have a very demanding peak period. For Dev it is the "death march" in the last 3 to 6 months (to year) before RTM, for CSS, Premier, and HR it is 3 to 6 months after RTM. - Just learn to ride the wave... whatever cycle your business rides, find it, accept it, and keep your feet underneath you. It will level off in 6 to 9 months.Morale always drops, don't get caught in that wave, it will make your time miserable. Keep your chin up, keep your balance, and you can acctually rise up quickly during the high tide.

#2 Some really bad HR/Pay policies, as a manager I sometimes found this very restrictive in how I could pay for performance. It went from guideline to policy, and took a lot of control a way from the direct managers. Sometime your review rankings would come back down changed from higher level management, and you would have to switch from a "You've been doing great work" to "You need to step it up", simply because higher management tweaked the budget somewhere.