Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-04-28
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former

Imagine the Kremlin, but with Termination Instead of Assassination
Pros: Free coffee, drinks, excellent cafeterias
The chance to have your work on millions of machines
Cons: The sense of repression and fear is intense.  People who have every reason to believe they are in good standing are terminated for obscure reasons.  Innovative ideas are regarded as challenges to authority.  Most of all, the company is obsessed with standards and uniformity and the standards are useless, counterproductive, often idiotic.  Coding standards for example require illegibility, prescribe incoherent and inefficient practices, and demand useless extra work e.g. Unit test cases for components where they are inapplicable.  The innovative atmosphere of the late 1980s is completely gone.  Where once people worked until 8:30 PM because they loved what they were doing, they now work until 11:30 because they're terrified of their next annual review.  Strangers to their families, stressed, exhausted, with 20 hours of recurring meetings every week.

Project planning is driven by competition between fiefdoms, and lurches from one bad idea to another.