Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-05-27
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Morale is getting lower
Pros: Lots of different areas to work
Lots of room to grow technicaly
Work-life balance
Inclusive culture
Good benefits such as 401k match and family coverage for insurance
Cons: Managers are too powerful, it shouldn't be this easy to hire or fire people
Diverse teams but not much diversity in the team. There is only Chinese people in most research teams. I mean all Chinese.
Pay is lower than most companies, especially on levels like 59,60,61,62
No free food, food on campus is expensive and not tasty. Lots of Mexican food despite there are almost no Mexican engineers. No Russian food despite %20 of the company are Russian.
You are pushed to leave company if you improved your skills because changing teams won't affect your level band and salary. Some teams doesn't have much budget but some have a lot of budget. I saw level 60 people who are much better than level 63 seniors but are not paid equally. This makes them unhappy because they are forced to go higher paying companies. Lots of people leave the company because of this reason.
Too much bureaucracy between higher and lower band people and they treat you with no respect.
Being a contractor here is much better than being a full time employee. You don't have to deal with politics and can survive just by doing your job.  
Review system is a joke. 
Not enough accommodations for disabled people. Lots of benefit denials. 
Not enough financial support for education. My manager offered me $x towards college tuition for a year but actual tuition is more than $20x. It must be a joke.