Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-08-06
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Several companies in one
Pros: Competitive salaries and benefits.
If you are lucky enough to be in the right team you might be able to participate in great and ambitious projects.
Cons: A lot of time and effort is wasted on politics and their performance review system, instead of executing for the benefit of customers (the system just changed but it will take years to revert the culture it created). For example, I have seen decisions taken by management because that would improve their perfomance review on a given year, even if that would not have any impact on customers and will become almost-useless spending. "Visibility" is so important that everybody spends most of their time working on it instead of getting things done that will ultimately have a real benefit for customers. This results in massive amounts of useless email, status reports, documentation, etc., so much that it becomes impossible to keep up with it. 
Another negative is that you can only move laterally in the same role, and one level down if you are changing roles.