Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-03-27
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Incredibly smart people poisoned by back stabbing review system
Pros: Decent pay and very good benefits (great health insurance, discount gym membership, free bus pass, showers/locker rooms and locked bike storage, etc.)
Flexible hours - just get your work done on time and meet deadlines
Informal culture
Tons of different projects and teams 
Free internal training programs, many of which are quite good
Largest privately held free-communing/shuttle system in the country (MS Connector)
Incredibly smart, driven people - not a lot of "dead weight" here
Cons: Review system pits colleagues against each other for promotions, pay raises, bonuses and stock awards. If you aren't moving up, you're moving out. Collaboration is encouraged, but absolutely not rewarded due to the review system. I know they have recently stopped the stack ranking process, but the culture around it has been in place for decades and will not be easy to change.

Also, because of this culture of "me first", and a history/culture centered on technology/code to solve problems, Microsoft doesn't really care or know how to care about its customers. They have top-notch researchers with PhDs who don't know how and don't have the time to conduct proper user research. The few that do aren't valued. As a result, the focus is on features, code and getting promotions, not understanding real-world customer needs and collaborating as a team to solve them. I found this frustrating and prevented me from getting excited about the projects on which I worked because I knew they weren't going to really help solve the users' problems.