Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-01-31
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Very mixed feelings
Pros: Company is on the right path, making necessary changes & with a clear vision and great product roadmap. Inspiring CEO and an engineer back in charge. Company does have a great ethos & gives you a lot of autonomy, freedom & flexibility in how you structure your work life. The salary & benefits are above average. It is a good company to get on your CV.
Cons: There are just too many lifers in the company who are really behind the curve in terms of innovation & fresh thinking. At times, it felt like the civil service where you clock in, put in your time & if you keep you nose clean and schmooze the right people- you'll move up. I hate to say it but I had some of the most incompetent managers of my career in MS. Not bad people, just unconsciously incompetent.Yet they are the people reviewing you and putting you on that slow train to nowhere from a career development point of view. This just exacerbates the trend towards settling into a role with comfortable pay & benefits, keep everything stead as she goes whilst competitors eat your lunch.  
Training & development are below par. And for a tech company, some of the internal systems & processes were beyond bad.
Internal comms within larger teams is awful. People seem to hold onto information as some sort of ego stroking status symbol yet there is never any accountability for this behaviour.