Company: Microsoft
Date: 2010-09-05
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Still suffering growing pains - can't let go of past glories
Pros: Benefits are compelling (health care, vision, dental)
Big interesting problems to work on
Recognized name in industry (even if you don't agree it's leading edge anymore)
Cons: Very heavy in middle management, who are interesting in protecting their fiefdom at the expense of individual contributors who actually get work done
Once you want to get to director role, you really need exec sponsorship - otherwise you should accept that you should go to another company
Difficult to place to be now (2010) given a lot of RIFs are occurring
Staying too long at Microsoft makes you very unaware of "real" trends happening outside the company
Company has fallen asleep at the wheel (missed social networking, cloud services, social gaming, etc) - and upper management really wants to defend old cash cows instead of innovating