Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-03-13
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Great company, but the Services division has a very different culture
Pros: Very bright people, good pay, good benefits.  Educational advancement opportunities/certs.  Looks great on a resume.
Cons: Highly political environment.  Questionable review model of assigning people to a fixed distribution of numbers 1-5, the fives get fired and the ones get the largest bonuses.  This sounds fine to a top performer, but the problem is that the numbers assigned aren't based on performance.  I was told that it wasn't what I accomplished but how.  So employees spend a lot of time doing self-promotion and self-marketing in order to make it look like they are top performers, or doing character assassination of other employees in order to make themselves look better during the 'stack ranking.'  

Upper management doesn't seem to have the ability to differentiate what is truly valuable from what is BS, so employees spend a lot of time on bizarre, tedious cut & paste activities and politics rather than work that really benefits the company overall.  

There isn't a focus on actual quality of support to customers but rather on the appearance of quality, so there is rampant manipulation and gaming of metrics, survey results, etc, in order to make the business appear to be doing better than it actually is.

Employees are expected to work at least 65 hours per week if they expect to advance.  

Those who question the way things are done or say, "uh, isn't the emperor naked?" don't do well in the culture.