Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-07-29
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Cold and competitive
Pros: Amazing benefits and compensation. Many perks such as free health club membership and discounts on almost everything. If you live in Redmond (well, you don't really exist if you don't),  you are blessed with tons of opportunities to do something different. Lots of training and interesting work. Great computers. Employees are well cared for.
Cons: We are required to work like dogs. 
We are competitively rated on competencies such as collaboration. Counter-intuitive. 
Everyone is expected to be a star. You must grow or you are managed out.
It's often cheaper to have a small team build internal tools rather than buy them. But that means most internal tools used to develop software are very sub standard compared to tools in the marketplace that are developed with more resources. 
Unnecessarily complex. 
Entitled and sheltered employees who think a 5% bonus (one of the lowest one can get) is really awful - that's higher than most people get in the real world. 
Employees have golden handcuffs on their hands that just accept the way the company is and think there's no changing it. 
People are supposed to change jobs every three years, so no one has any loyalty to each other. 
Very hard to assimilate as an external hire. 
If competitors aren't delivering a feature, why would we?