Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-11-27
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Excellent company, lots of smart people
Pros: Excellent benefits, very high levels of flexibility and latitude at an individual level to drive or influence decisions with tasks. Constantly challenging and learning environment. Company has more than 10 multi-billion businesses, and even though the sheer size often creates unnecessary processes and politics, smaller, more nimble startup environments are also abundant.
Cons: Sales-oriented mentality relatively too heavy in senior management. Years of business division model managed by individual P/L fiscal responsibilities meant less risky to focus on incremental improvements on products so sales can grow a certain % in each fiscal year. And the 'follow the market' approach to product development meant consistently a few cycles behind market makers. Even with the recent re-orgs instituted by Ballmer, the top ranks are still predominantly sales people, who are best at driving and managing sales organizations. Plus a top-heavy culture means conformity (to a sales-oriented culture, as opposed to a more bottom-up engineering and product-focused one) is preferred, and very difficult for grassroots innovation to make ground.