Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-12-03
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

A Sinking Ship
Pros: Beautiful campus
Flexible work policies are common
Free drinks
Smart people to work with
Great Health Care- but this is changing significantly in 2013
Cons: Review System- it has become more important to "manage your career" than create great products
Review System- Promotes back stabbing and an unhealthy, toxic work environment
Bloated software products that no longer delight the industry
Horrible software licensing system
Engineering "silos" of developer/test/program management which are ineffective and inefficient

I left Microsoft after 13 years.  For the first 11 years, I received excellent performance evaluations.  Then, when the review system changed, I suddenly found myself to be rated a poor performer- despite being the only person in my group to actually deliver a feature that shipped!  Once you get a bad review,  you are labeled as such and a comeback is extremely unlikely.  I decided to leave before enduring more undeserved humiliation.  I now work on open source software, and have replaced all of my windows based devices and software with open source, Apple, and Android equivalents.  This turned out to be much easier than expected- leading me to realize that Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant.