Company: Microsoft
Date: 2008-06-12
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Think of the company as "on-the-job training"
Pros: - A lot of smart people still work there
- Huge variety of products to work on, and internal movement is encouraged
- Benefits package is excellent
- Especially coming out of college, there are a lot of opportunities to learn and advance

All of the above apply mostly to technical people (developers, mostly).  If you're not a developer, the biggest pro is that MS will pay you for doing absolutely nothing.
Cons: - Senior management behaves stupidly very consistently.
- MS is acquisition crazy, despite the fact that the acquisitions have _never_ worked.
- Review process is increasingly arbitrary and random, as well as a huge waste of time.  Employees and managers fill out extensive forms "documenting" their "performance", which are actively ignored -- usually the review decisions are made before anything is submitted.
- MS is increasingly populated by useless people.  Many organizations are so dominated by PMs that they are completely paralyzed -- they have an unlimited number of people who can distract developers while only a limited supply of developers themselves.
- Marketing is way too large and way too influential.
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