Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-02-22
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Cutting edge work for some, great & caring company for all
Pros: Context: Engineering Discipline, been with the company for a little over 2 years

- You feel like the company actually cares. The CPO Lisa Brummel often engages with employees in public ways and has a phenomenal attitude. Giving programs, health benefits, fitness incentives, continuing education, structured career conversations -- lots of things point to the company taking a genuine interest in your personal and professional well being (of course not without its own motives).

- Lots of room for growth at the lower levels, things start to become bottle-necked around the "Manager of managers" level

- Company is constantly reinventing itself. It can be a dinosaur in many ways (especially legacy code bases and antiquated engineering styles), but everyday we get closer to modernizing the entire company from the bottom up. This can also be a source of frustration, but is much more exciting.

- Product portfolio is second to none. This is the only company in the world where I can work on a PC OS, tablet hardware, machine learning algorithm, design a popular coding language, work on embedded technology, build a productivity suite, develop a game console -- and still be under the same corporate roof with no relocation necessary.
Cons: - Company at times doesn't appear designed to retain top-tier talent. Elimination of the stack system, while widely praised, wasn't replaced by any incentives for the top 5% to stay. This is a symptom of a company which, while inventing itself in many ways, can still at times be a monolithic bureaucracy 

- Product group and corporate culture can be Russian Roulette. There are teams at the company working on breakthrough products filled to the brim with absolute rockstars. There are other teams working on maintaining antiquated contractually ordained technology with people who reek of sadness and despair. Thankfully horizontal mobility is super common at the company, so if you get dealt a bad hand you're not locked in forever.