Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-06-30
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Great Company but being on the right team is important
Pros: - Competitive base pay
- Good bonus and stock for higher levels (Senior band and above)
- Excellent benefits - probably close to the best around
- Product organizations are highly respected and easy to move around
- Product organization are interested in your career and will help you succeed and treat failure as a learning experience (just don't keep failing)
- Work-Life balance is pretty good most of the time (there are some exceptions)
Cons: - Bonus is OK for lower level bands but stock is minimal
- IT organization (MSIT) has a bad reputation in Product organizations (if you go into IT it's hard to get out)
- IT org is much too political and if you show poor performance during a review they'd rather get rid of you instead of helping you succeed
- IT org engineering groups rely too much on off-shore vendors and are vendor heavy.
- IT org engineering FTE employees don't get to code as much as Product groups so your skills will atrophy if you don't do something else to supplement.
- Culture is deteriorating because Microsoft is just too big.