Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-09-29
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Great Potential, Lost in the Woods. A way to go to realize the promise of culture change.
Pros: By in large the people are smart and committed to joint success. The pay seems good. Benefits are great, although changes in health benefits mean that it is no longer 'the best', it's still top tier. The majority of Microsoft people work hard and want to succeed. You get the best technology you need to do your job. There are many different types of jobs, careers and professions. From entertainment to productivity to business process software to hardware. This means you can change teams/divisions and have very different experiences and build different knowledge. In some ways it's like "many companies in one", in a good way. Whilst all companies struggle with diversity in high tech Microsoft does feel better than many. It has more to do but is doing well and headed in the right direction on most diversity fronts.
Cons: Ballmer instilled a sycophantic culture in the company which is taking time to work its way out of the system, despite Satya's best efforts. Some of the Presidents are still very much like this, don't you dare disagree, even if you have the data. If they say 'jump' you better jump. This is common in many teams. It is demoralizing and results in a culture of fear in many teams.  
Many people at Microsoft work far too hard (but not smart) with little benefit to their careers or personal life. To get to Director, then GM and so forth you have to give up your life in progressive chunks. So you better love what you do. People should take a break and gain some perspective at times (diversity). Employees should aim to work smart. There is a lot of busy work at Microsoft; emails and meetings are chronic. 
It can take a while to understand the culture and landscape and therefore who you need to work with to get things done. If you don't find the right person you run the risk of invoking the wrath of another team inadvertently. However due to the level of busy work and thus lack of awareness of the big picture often those with the wrath often will have been made aware but were too 'randomized' to be able to engage with you until you do something that crosses swords with them. Then it hits the fan.
Change happens on geological time scales. Those with an entrepreneurial or innovative mind set often find this frustrating and leave, including many younger hires. This has an overall negative impact on diversity. This in turn has impacted Microsoft's ability to innovate and compete in the past two decades. Satya is working to change this culture, to make it more dynamic, but that takes time.
Politics is very much a part of life and significant energy must be spent on internal positioning and marketing of your own work. To be fair with 100K+ employees these facts are not surprising. For long term success you do need to factor this into your work planning; if you spend to much time doing and not enough time marketing then you will only ever get so far. The opposite is being at a small company and having to market your work... externally. However of course if you don't want to do marketing, promotion, communications or advertising then you may prefer to work at a smaller company where those responsible for the marketing et al are specifically in such roles.The irony at Microsoft is many people in marketing are not very good at marketing their work; at best people don't know what they are working on, at worst they do market their work but it comes across as self promotional. Internal marketing is a subtle, collaborative skill.