Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-12-28
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Optimization of the business often trumps human factors
Pros: 1. Good pay to work-life balance ratio: if you're trying to maximize income with decent constraints on your level of effort and time, then MS is probably a good choice.
2. Offices! Single occupancy offices for most of the Redmond-based employees!
3. Hierarchy is surprisingly flat in many parts of the company.

This is true at most companies, and it's certainly true here.  If you get along with your immediate manager, you will find your time here tolerable.
Cons: 1. MS keeps dogfooding its products on employees and moving people around: both re-orgs and office moves.  The company has an optimizing culture that neglects its effects on humans.  Then they try to compensate in the worst way possible: corporate initiatives.  Growth mindset, inclusivity, etc.  They'll put up posters and send out emails that people just ignore or mock.
2. They are gradually converting offices to open space.
3. Tons of politics.  Much of the old guard feel obligated to justify their employment; they attempt to "own" as much as possible, usually to the detriment of projects and the mental health of individual contributors.
4. The left hand doesn't know what it's own fingers are doing, let alone the right hand.  There is a lot of duplicated work, competing internal technologies (cf. Skype and Teams), and a complete lack of communication across different parts of the company.