Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-04-22
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Mostly good place to work, but stack ranking is really damaging
Pros: Microsoft still has really good benefits, even though they have cut back in the last couple of years.  There are a lot of really good people there, and good products to work on.
Cons: The stack ranking mechanism is devastating.  No matter how well you do your job, you can be rated as the worst in your team and heavily penalized.  If you have a team of 20 excellent people, and another team has 20 terrible people, each team gets the same % of people with a top rating, and the same % of people with a bottom rating.  It forces employees to want their colleagues to perform poorly - it destroys teamwork.