Company: Microsoft
Date: 2017-07-07
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Pay good, but FTE work/life balance can be terrible, depending on team
Pros: - Good Salary
- Good Benefits
- There are some fun products / franchises to work on
Cons: - In some departments, a constant 50-60 hours/week with no extra compensation is silently expected on top of strict core hours.  Only want to work 40 hours/week?  Expect to fall behind and be replaced by someone willing to do 50-60.
- Want to take a vacation?  Good luck finding someone to cover your work.  During a 40 hour period, I had to do 60 hours week before and 60 hours week after a 1-week vacation to stay caught up, and still had to use my vacation days.  Can't trade OT for time off.
- Depending on manager, feedback on performance may be good (early, actionable) or bad (too late, in-actionable).
- Mid-to-upper management is all about coming up with fancy-sounding ideas and initiatives full of buzzwords that everyone else is forced to follow, but in reality these "initiatives" tend to be poorly thought-out, huge time wasters, and are obviously only there to pad management's commitments so they get good reviews and bonuses
- Lots of office politics.  In many cases, advancement/bonuses/etc. are all about "looking good" to the right people, not actually being good at your job
- Constantly pushing good ICs to become mediocre managers instead of letting them become *great* ICs.  This results in ICs that are great at knowing one tech / area / etc. being forced to own multiple areas at a much lower level of fluency and be less effective.
- Microsoft as a whole feels relatively clueless about making new products that customers actually want.  Windows Phone is just one example of how Microsoft can totally shoot themselves in the foot, Skype hasn't had a major update in years and is losing ground to fast-moving newcomers, etc.  Depending on what you work on, there's a chance that it simply won't matter or exist in the next few years, which is frustrating.