Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-04-01
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Boring place where politics often winning over common sense
Pros: Work-life balance could be very good. Depends on a group, but you still may get a chance to work with very intelligent and competent people. Very good benefits this year, however 2013 benefits will take a major hit
Cons: Performance model suitable for manual labor blue color workers applied to creative workers, software developers. This model creates unnecessary office politics, seriously damages team spirit and make many employees and managers focus on what needs to be done to look good at their next review instead of building a successful products customers would be delighted to use.
New Sinofski philosophy also bring collective "responsibility" of trio-manager (Dev Manager, Program manager and Test manager) instead of personal responsibility of General Manager.
In many cases we are getting "design by committee" / "deside by committee" environments.
I am yet to be convinced it'll bring more good rather than harm.