Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-11-12
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Company at its inflection point - what happens next MS - can sink or swim
Pros: Work life balance is pretty good.  You have time to see the whole picture and care about what you do and you can do great things.  You can make a difference and enrich your experience.
Compensation is better than average and benefits are good.  
Well respected company.
I have been working here for 20+ years.  I think my life experience here is rich and varied.  
I joined when we just released Win 3.1 and it was not a Windows world yet.  We were a young company and working away from a bottom up culture.  We were just figuring out things.  I met Bill Gates and talked interactively to him for 15 mins.  I did impact full things that mattered a lot.  So many good people. I could indulge my passion around work.
Cons: There are plenty downsides.  The review system is one and everything I read from other who wrote their reviews about the company seem pretty much true.  It can destroy good people and bring out negative things in people.  I used to manage a team and was forced to cut good people that I felt had good potential and could benefit the company.  Because of the curve we had to exaggerate failures to justify ranking.  You could nail all your commitments and find out it doesn't matter what you did but how you did it.  Or vice versa.  Managers get ratings too.  its very funny,  you can tell its poll season when managers become super nice and then tend to revert to their old selves afterwards.