Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-12-29
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

It was "o.k." but proceed with caution.
Pros: Most people who work here are very bright.
Benefits are fantastic and second to none.
Great to have on your resume.
Cons: Zero work life balance and the company talks out of both sides of it's @&&.   One minute they say that they want you to have work life balance, the next they say that if you really want to get ahead that you have to put in many, many hours to get ahead.   Many of the people in my group would be doing work into the night on a daily basis.

They issue an annual employee survey where the purpose is to take the temperature of the employees and how they like to work at Microsoft.    Each of the years that I was there, our direct manager would have a meeting with us and would say "if you have any problems at all, we would appreciate it if you told us in advance of the survey so we can work things out".  This to me is just purely unethical - You are essentially strong armed into providing responses that are not honest for fear of it coming back to bite you professionally.  Managers seem to be "graded" on this so if they have a small group of reports, then it wouldn't be too hard for them to figure out who said what (or they may assume).   

Speaking of surveys - they do the same with their customers as well.  This is a big metric within MS and reps have to be very careful as to who they get to fill out their surveys in order to get a good response.  Have literally seen reps blatantly ask for good marks rather than honest ones.  

Political - very political internally.   There are people who have been there for years and are very much an "inner circle".    People are some-what click'ish.

Not really a "negative" but just different - Very different sales cycle and unique from most other sales organizations.   July, there is nothing going on, August through ~October is mostly "sales planning".   Different in that the specialists are responsible for telling the account managers where the opportunities are within the account managers companies.   This is not a big negative, but I do find it unusual.  You would think that the account manager should know where the opportunities are within their own accounts.