Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-03-28
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

You'll never know what you'll get
Pros: Microsoft has a huge infrastructure designed to enable their employees to make the most of their experiences, including a very robust HR implementation that makes benefits support extremely easy. I left before the new "review" system was put in place, but that was a promising move as well. People are generally passionate about doing well. There is really no limit to the kind of product you can work on, so as your passions go, so can your place in the company.
Cons: Oversight at the middle management layer is really terrible. A manager is only as good as s/he chooses to be, and there is no real accountability for a manager being good or bad. To be clear, there are some employees who choose to be really great managers, and there are others who look at being a manager a personal career stepping stone and don't take their direct reports' careers seriously. What's more, many managers are individual contributors as well, so they have to look out for themselves as well as try to manage their team. Finally, many employees believe that being a manager is a step up the ladder, so that becomes an defining goal, but they may not develop the skills to be successful at it. I believe strongly that if Microsoft incentivized their managers to be great managers, the effectiveness of their direct reports would go up.