Company: Microsoft
Date: 2017-09-28
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Tide is changing as we move to the cloud
Pros: Microsoft still has some of the best benefits around and where else can you go where you can, in some cases, walk down the hallway to talk with the one who wrote the book on a given technology and was one of the developers.
Most employees are eager to help others when asked and also have a ton of knowledge to share.
Reviews are leaner with the Connect process.  If you are lucky enough to have a good people manager, you should look to have a Connect every 2-3 months, which is great for helping to keep you on track and give you more accurate measurements of impact.
Azure is taking off and the focus is moving entirely to an engineering/developer mindset, leveraging Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).  The more you deliver that has direct impact the more you will be rewarded.
Cons: The Ying to the Yang is that while Connects are good, they are also limited to the discretion of the manager.  You will likely get at least 2 Connects a year based on organizational pressure to management; however, in some cases that is not always the case.  Even if you can represent significant impact in Connects, you are again at the discretion of the manager.  You manager can completely disagree and provide negative feedback and there is not much you can do about it other than to move internally to another team or organization to avoid a bad situation.
If you are an employee in operations, IT, or other service engineering discipline, you will need to know coding and deliver code.  This is where things are going.  If you cannot adjust to this new skill set and deliver against it, then you are going to be in a bad place.
While there is no "bell curve" with the new reward system, I have seen a significant amount of changes to how rewards are now distributed.  There is definitely the "good ol' boy" network and favoritism.  Likely not different than most other companies.  Key point is that while the new reward system sounded cool and looked good a few years ago, reality is catching up.