Company: Microsoft
Date: 2008-08-24
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

A great place to work
Pros: At MSR, you have a chance to work with the best and the brightest -- the caliber of people that would otherwise be on the faculty at a top-tier research university.  MSR is pretty much the only surviving old-style industrial research lab in the tradition of Bell Labs and PARC. The compensation starts out good and becomes great as the stock awards ramp up.
Cons: If you are not in Redmond or Beijing, there is very little opportunity to grow beyond an individual contributer role, unless you move out of Research.