Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-11-04
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Not a place to grow your career
Pros: Good pay/benefits
Good brand name
Ability to work on cutting edge consumer products before they are released in the market
Cons: Highly political work environment. After working for over an year, you will realize that brilliance alone won't get you through going on to the next level. 

Managers highly advocate the concept of independent work rather than team work. I've had one manager asking other team members to not help me in my work so that I start working independently (really ??). 

Bad performance review system - Stack ranking is fine. But there is a concept of being visible across teams. Doing well and exceeding expectations in your team isn't enough. You need to be able to impress managers in other teams to get a better rating / promotions during annual performance calibrations. 

Very high turnover (in this office specifically) - Mainly due to the internal politics and the review system. The other thing is management will make you work those extra hours when people leave or when other teams lose resources. But don't expect to get rewarded for working those extra hours. Those activities do not fall in the category of being visible across other teams.

Work/life balance - Management keeps discussing about this every year during the MS Polls if the results are bad. I haven't seen any concrete steps in this direction, atleast till i worked there.

Skill set development - If you are working as an SDET, it might be a bit difficult to develop skill sets which are marketable outside. Most of the tools/technologies used are internal to microsoft and hardly any are used outside microsoft, except C# / .NET

Underskilled managers - MS needs to do some work on hiring good managers. Some of them are just there based on the amount of years spent in the company and may not be good at coaching ICs. If you get a good manager, you might be in luck and may have a better experience working here.