Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-01-06
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Good place to learn and profit elsewhere
Pros: You'll learn a lot especially from technical area, a lot of challenging tasks and a level of expected quality is quite high. They also really expect you to deliver at the deadline, so pressure is high but it might push you above your limit. If you want to learn there are a handful of resources and smart people to learn from. Also engineers get a lot of freedom in a way they accomplish their goals, it's mostly delivering them that counts, not the path you select...
Cons: It’s mostly delivering that counts, so some people don't care that much about quality. There don't seem to be a good mechanism for (technical) quality validation. Again this is a very large company and things probably look different in other teams, especially in states when they do all really important stuff. There is also this weird culture, where people are mostly concerned about who will look bad on end year review and not taking any risks to help others, if it might make them look bad.