Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-08-03
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Solid employer
Pros: I really liked the Redmond campus. The fact that it's located in the suburbs is a big advantage, usually you need to move to a city to work for a good company. They have good benefits, like free transportation system, cheap employee restaurants, good health benefits, good compensation, etc. I really liked that they have private offices in many buildings across the campus, unfortunately they are slowly moving towards open space now.
Cons: After my internship I received a full-time offer from Microsoft. As a non-US citizen I needed a H1B visa to work in the US. After I finished my internship I had to wait for around 10 months to finally find out that my petition was not selected in the H1B lottery so there were no options for me to start working in the US in 2016. Microsoft offered me a placement in Canada instead, with a completely new compensation. They also said I would be working remotely with a Redmond team. I didn't really like the perspective of remote work from Canada for around 2 years so eventually I declined the offer. I was really surprised that they couldn't offer a position in Europe where they also have several development centers, eg. Dublin. Another thing I did not like was the fact that it was nearly impossible to get a full-time offer for a different team than the one I interned with. The team seemed rather uninteresting to me and I figured I would get bored there pretty quickly as there probably would not be much opportunity for me to learn. Overall, I enjoyed my time at Microsoft but I really think they should do something about their hiring process for people from outside of US.