Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-11-20
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Principal Software Engineer
Pros: Great salary.  Sometimes the work can be interesting and meaningful.  Starting to change but it's hard to change with so much legacy crap and invested bureaucracy.  Everything that happens there is usually a 100+ person project so that's good and bad.  The good is that it can be hugely impactful and the bad is that it's slow as molasses.
Cons: Lot's of churn and uncertainty.
The review systems and stack ranking STILL exist even if managers deny it!  (I was a manager there)  
This results in way too much dishonesty and "looking good" to managers to get top compensation.  Folks are afraid of looking bad so there a lack of candor about issues.