Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-06-15
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Good place to work at if you are smart, open and result-oriented
Pros: Very flexible environment at some places like evangelism (DPE):
- every employee is expected to plan their results/action and make personal commitments
- no strict rules, job descriptions you have to follow line-by-line (of course except general compliance stuff, which is obvious)
- much of success depends on your ability to find people in other groups who have similar objectives in their field, build relations/trust and work together (cross-group collaboration)
Cons: People management practices are questionable - cascading top-down metrics on how many best/good/ok/bad people in every organization leads to very bad quality of annual performance reviews - talks between manager and employee are meaningless most of the time.
if you have been successful all 5 years after joining MIscosoft - your annual vesting of MSFT stock starts playing significant role in the annual income, which is perfect for keeping good people in long-term for Microsoft, but this is like "golden  cell" where many good people are imprisoned for 10-15 years. And working at different positions in different divisions of Microsoft becomes their profession - they will not be valuable commodity at labour market should Microsoft fire them.