Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-10-27
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

A Great Place to be a Dev!  A Terrible Place to Be a Service Engineer!
Pros: It's a blast to work at scale as a Systems Engineer - and chances are, this is as big a scale as you'll ever operate!  Managing global scale incidents, and being a part of delivering a really big product is exciting.  You will hone some skills here- but just what they are will depend entirely on where you end up.
Cons: I should preface this by saying:  Microsoft, like every giant corporation, depends enormously on where you land.  If you know the people you'll be working with, it's a GREAT opportunity.  I rolled the dice to become an FTE, and that was a huge mistake.  There are segments of this company that are 20 years behind the industry.

It's easy to convince yourself that you had an influence- but as a Service Engineer, you won't.  Y They'll interview you and ask if you can code.  If you can, find another job.  Once you're hired, you can expect to NEVER code again- I even had managers get angry with me when I simply checked in fixes to problems myself.  
I was subjected to 9-10 months of constant reorganizations, with almost NO work requested of me during this time.  It was maddening.  My team was put on death watch for a collection of old services(killed by Nadella, but rightfully so!).  So there I was, as a top performer in my level, stuck patrolling a product cemetery while my former product group plowed forward into new and shiny things.  
This is because Microsoft ONLY respects Devs.  Not SE's, not Testers, and maybe not even PMs.  As an SE your opinion, and your leadership's opinion, will never matter.  Unless someone with a developer title agrees with you.  The job a Service Engineer is to absorb the technical debt of your development team. I found myself in this job getting paid more than ever, while people expected less than ever of me.  It was a depressing, demoralizing year, and I am delighted to be paid more for doing more elsewhere.  My resume grew almost none, other than the value of their name.