Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-02-13
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Easy to grow, difficult to stay
Pros: - Great learning opportunity: Working at Microsoft, you get to work with some very competent people, and you learn a lot. I learned more from being a year at Microsoft than being three years at my previous employer.

- Quickly given responsibility: At Microsoft the number of interesting projects greatly outnumber the number of people working there. This means that new employees are quick to be given responsibility of projects, often pushing them into unfamiliar territory and forcing them to grow. 

- Good work/life balance and environment: People working from home is not uncommon at Microsoft, and the work hours are generally very flexible. When working at the office there is a good environment and the employees are well taken care of (free coffee, soda, fruit, etc.)
Cons: - Bloated processes and time wasting: I would say that, on average, every Microsoft employee probably waste at least one hour a day due to unnecessarily complicated processes or bloated reporting systems. 

- Unreasonably difficult career planning: In recent years, the HR department has been trying to put in procedures to limit nepotism in hiring and promotion. They have been unsuccessful, but instead they have made it impossible for graduates, interns and student workers to career plan. Most of my peers in other companies have career plans. I don’t even know if I’m still at Microsoft in three months. I've seen incredibly talented young people leave Microsoft simply due to uncertainty and lack of career planning. They now work for Microsofts competitors..