Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-02-11
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Old culture is battling new culture and the casualties are piling up.
Pros: Great benefits.  Awesome atmosphere and overall great company.  Hoping the new CEO will free things up across groups to allow unhindered and less political work to get done.
Cons: Politics kill innovation and motivation for lots of employees.  The old CEO way of doing things was to pit teams doing similar work against each other so that the best and brightest idea rose to the surface.  This often frustrated more creative and introspective types and skewed loyalty to whoever could hold up the brightest "glowing orb" to the leadership.  This leads to teams that don't actively accomplish much but talk a lot about doing everything in order to make it look their job is worth keeping around.  Meanwhile, the people who are actually accomplishing and solving real day to day business needs are left in the dust to try and justify the work they do.  It is a real poisonous atmosphere at times and erodes morale.