Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-05-02
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Love/Hate relationship (disclaimer: "Cons" circa 2010)
Pros: - Access to entirely new work/product areas when you get antsy for a change
- Fair pay
- Talented workforce
- Access to anything you need to be successful (work machines, tools, expensive market research, training, legal, etc.)
Cons: - By 2010, 40% of time was spent trying to better clarify roles and responsibilities across teams, and sometimes even within teams (side effect of competitive work environment)
- Related, way too much time focused on internal competition (constant angling for budgets, reviews, pay, promotions) vs. the real, external competition; Teams or even entire projects enjoyed watching each other fail; not only wouldn't offer help, would take steps to cement others' failures; led to very distrustful work environment, even among peers (what should be your everyday friends); people or teams steal each other's ideas without credit being given; etc.
- GM & VP level leaders don't admit when they see their project failing, don't want to risk losing their budgets and influence, will ride the failed project to its death knowing they will avoid being held accountable (these are the expensive projects that sometimes go public, crash and embarrassingly burn ... most of the people on the project saw it coming all along ...)
- Clever policy to weed out older people (too many years of service at same salary grade red flags you from getting average or better than average reviews; also red flags you for job transfers within the company ... good things don't come of this; I'm not making this up, they were transparent about this).  Newer people may be ok with this ... but someday they will be coming for you (if they don't change this) !  :)