Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-09-18
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Great Pay, Average Benefits, Brilliant People, Outdated Tools & Culture
Pros: Great pay
Average benefits
Brilliant people to work with and learn from
Feels great to work on products that so many people use
It is possible to keep working on an open source project you may contribute to, if you follow the appropriate process
Cons: Culture is somewhat ignorant about and/or resistant to use tools everyone else in the world uses. Often choosing to build its own internal tool in-house that is either buggy, "special" in interface, or just outdated. Examples: build tools, source depot, various test frameworks
Working from home (from a fiber optic connection in Redmond!) is stunningly unrelaible and inefficient, at least for general development work on a large codebase.
Process to approve contributing to open source on your freetime is relatively cumbersome