Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-07-29
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Smartest people work here, except in management
Pros: Everyone is incredibly bright, so there's no waiting for people to understand things; if you're the top performer at your company, you likely will struggle here for the first year, but you won't regret it.  Everyone is super smart, able to write and speak clearly and have fairly good soft skills too.
Cons: There are no women here, none.  The women that are here typically have master's degrees and a decade or more of experience before setting foot in the door.  THe men were typically hired out of high school, sat in the queues for that long and either now manage your team or get high bonuses for being one of the guys.  I would never have a woman work here; it's ridiculous how much time you have to spend acting like a guy to even be considered for anything.  The other major issue is that most of these folks haven't worked anywhere else, so they're always coming up with 'ideas' to sell to our clients that the clients will never buy and won't make a real impact because we haven't worked in the real world.  There's also a lot of shuffling around of your management and entire divisions even though what you do doesn't EVER change...so maybe it would be best to juts get rid of the management which doesn't do much more than approve expense reports and stack rank.