Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-01-04
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

I'd skip this place
Pros: Great benefits, some very smart people, competitive pay.  They seem to give some lip service to professional development for their senior managers.
Cons: Don't fool yourself, the stack ranking still exists.  Found myself on a leadership team where we put knives in backs, daily.  The culture of this place prohibits any semblance of innovation or creativity.  Just look at their products.  Are you buying them?  I'm not.  This is a vicious place to work where self-preservation trumps teamwork.  On our leadership team, we scrambled to keep up with our competition, and always found ourselves 5 steps behind.  In a company that touts leadership, I found the "leaders" I worked with to be followers, merely mouthing the words of someone smarter, who said things months, if not years, before they did.  As much as Microsoft embraces strategy, I found very little strategic vision within its walls.  Microsoft is no longer a monopolistic utility telling its customers how much they are going to spend on their products.  Better companies are finding ways to gain market share by doing guess what?  Providing products and services that customers actually want.  I think of Microsoft as the GM of the 80s.  Still plenty of hubris, not quite smart enough to see that they already lost the race...