Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-10-15
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Great people, going through lots of change
Pros: There are some amazingly talented people at Microsoft and working with them is a pleasure.  The sales environment is getting more high-pressure, but still nothing like what you hear from other places.  They froze S-plan (sales people) base salaries and upped OTE by 8%, I believe, but the quotas are getting staggering.  Everyone on my team has a quota over $10M.  You can make a comfortable living and have good work-life balance.
Cons: A lot of transition means searching for answers.  First it was Software + Services, now its Cloud First, Mobile First.  There is a huge push to begin LOB selling, but unfortunately Microsoft doesn't sell much in the way of business solutions, it sells plumbing, so actually figuring out what to do is a struggle sometimes.

Quotas go up but customers remain the same, so its squeezing existing customer bases for money.  Audits are up and customers are not happy.  High quotas mean its tough to be too much over 100%, so payouts are limited.

Microsoft is increasingly left behind - going into a customer to talk about Windows 8 Apps and Windows Phones while everyone has an iPhone and an iPad just underscore how out of touch Microsoft got and quickly it was passed by.