Company: Microsoft
Date: 2017-10-30
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Challenging work with smart coworkers but emphasis on soft skills and politics at senior level
Pros: good rewards if career driven and good at communicating visibility.  Flexible time especially if you can deliver output with quality on schedule.  Good middle manager can make the experience good and shields you from political randomization.
Cons: overemphasis on communication and politics and easy to burnout if poor at estimating/committing.  Even though abolished in name, 6 month reviews still use old stack ranking in 2017 across peers and sister teams at your band level.  internal engineering infrastructure is klunky and subpar compared to industry open source.  Too much use of slow/buggy internal proprietary tooling.  Tech stack is too much microsoft-built proprietary half-baked, buggy.  zero/horrible documentation and too much reliance on email distribution list support for any layer of the stack.  Your experience is a function of ability of manager and the team culture.  Top contributors can get slighted by average/subpar devs during review time based on politics.