Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-11-15
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great company, terrible management
Pros: Great talented people in most pockets of the business. 

The benefits are among the best in the industry, although the quality is gradually decreasing. 

Really nice campus in Redmond and modern offices in premier locations in international countries. 

Very diverse workforce with huge international presence.
Cons: The culture is very stifling and politically motivated. Extremely bureaucratic with all decisions driven by few  people inside closed doors. Management says to voice opinions, but if you don't sing to their tune, then you will see the result in the infamous stack ranking.

The managers have too much power to game the system of year end reviews. Have seen multiple people take advantage of the system by going out shopping with manager after work, socializing in company events and then getting high rating even though they have not been able to perform their core work efficiently. 

The culture fosters distrust among colleagues. For example, even if the manager is not present in a meeting, words gets to the manager somehow even after you made a comment and caveated it by saying that this discussion is strictly inside the meeting room only. 

The management tries to manage by keeping informational silos with the employees and acts arbitrarily to do what is advantageous to them. For example, I have been in groups where promotions were never shared and kept a secret. If management wants to give you a good rating, they will share the feedback you have got from your business partners.If the management wants to give you a bad rating, then they will say that the policy is not to share the feedback. 

The company will try to hire you down if you are coming from other company. The overall compensation is not good compared to many other companies, especially since they hire you in a lower position. On top of that, management does not give recognition to your past skills and you basically start afresh. 

Overall, people who pays 80% weight on politicking and 20% on actual value added work will do good. If not, you will find the culture very negative. At the end of the day, the work needs to be done and the company has a huge pool of vendors for that.

Note: All groups are not bad places to work for. There are some good groups and not so good ones. The above observations are some common themes based on working across multiple groups.