Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-12-29
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Employment experience is completely manager-dependent
Pros: Great benefits package
Interesting work
Opportunity to have broad impact
Cons: There are really two areas that hold Microsoft back from being a great company to work for; both could be easily addressed. First, your experience will depend completely on your manager - good manager = good experience, bad manager = bad experience. Microsoft has failed for a long time to effectively train, develop and mentor their first-tier managers and this is the core of their failures. Second, there is still far too much "busywork" that doesn't apply to a particular role's core execution. Does a developer really need to know how to sell a Surface? I agree that "everybody sells" but Microsoft seems to be lost in a morass of everybody sells everything...and the portfolio is just to broad and diverse for that to be the case.