Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-10-13
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Intense type A workplace with smart people but awful review system
Pros: You'll get to work with some of the smartest people you have ever worked with.  They care about employees, for the most part, and have a great 'give back to the community' culture.  

Working here will push you to be your best.  You learn things, for better or worse, and grow in your career.

If you are in a department with good morale and product you can have lots of fun in your work and get to know many great people.
Cons: Its a very passive aggressive workplace.  Not many people will tell you to your face if they have issues with you.  They will go to your manager or coworkers though.  It makes you feel as if you have to watch yourself at all times as you never know what someone is saying behind your back.  Depending on the department you may or may not get much work life balance.  Some departments are great but others are horrible.  The horrible ones may know it and really don't care.  You either work the massive hours or leave.

The review system is horrible.  You have a great bunch of smart motivated employees who are all striving to do their best.  However the review system forces someone to get a negative review.  If you get a negative review you have zero options.  You cannot move anywhere in the company, you are not even allowed to interview, and get zero monetary compensation for your work.  Employees are so worried about getting a poor review that they compete in a negative way against each other.  Other employees are seen as threats to their review scores.  Its almost impossible to truly collaborate when you are worried helping your co-workers will negatively impact your performance review.

The managers will tell you 'its only an evaluation for 1 year's worth of work'.  However its almost impossible to recover from a negative review.  You can try your hardest but the management will say 'we're giving opportunities to others with better reviews'.  At the end of the next year you'll be in the same place, not for lack of trying, but for lack of support from management and not getting additional opportunities to succeed.  You'll end up leaving or being asked to leave because of supposed 'poor performance'.  But the review system forced someone to be at the bottom even if everyone on the team did well.  Its a very crazy system.