Company: Microsoft
Date: 2011-05-11
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Good Company, a lot of politics
Pros: Large variety of products so you can work in any field you want. Microsoft compete in all software markests 
Great Benefits, health care, paternity and maternity leaves.
Well defined career development milestones
Cons: Long development cycles, almost every product in Microsoft rely on long stabilization period where Test try to find bugs and Development just fix bugs. 90% of the bugs are nice to have type of bugs that would better be delivered as incremental update to product once it is releases.
A lot of politices and processes specially around release management. You could fix a bug in 10 minutes and spend a month trying to get it into a patch
Review process rely on fitting team members on curve following normal distribution so your relationship with your manager and how much influence he/she has in addition to which part of the project management perceive as important play more factor in deciding where you land more than your actual contribution.