Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-06-14
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

An otherwise great company is hobbled by a wretched performance mgmt system and highly political career dev environment.
Pros: The company is still going to ride for a long time on its market-dominant Windows and Office systems. No worries about running out of cash any time in the foreseeable future. Well-established processes and tribal knowledge in nearly every discipline - engineering, marketing, finance. You can learn a ton in the early part of your career. Generally, very smart people with some breadth to their interests. Senior management is highly disciplined about business and money. They tend to make pretty smart decisions. Look at the company's balance sheet and revenue if you doubt that. Nice buildings, cafeterias, and environment as a whole. Reasonable compensation. Great benefits.
Cons: The performance management and career development problems at Microsoft are so bad they make front-page news and long-form articles in Vanity Fair. Developing a career at the mid-levels and trying to break into management is about who you know, not your competence (beyond an obvious minimum bar). The gaming of the system is embarrassing to witness, for a company that professes to be something else, and perhaps was at one point. The middle-management problem stifles a great deal of possible innovation.

IMO, senior management is completely out of touch with what it is like to try to build your career at the mid-stages at this company. Most of them did that in the 90's --- a very, very different time. It appears that they believe the same set of motivations are still in place for people, even though the compensation through company growth (stock, etc.) is not even remotely the same. As the Vanity Fair article pointed out, the only way to grow in compensation at Microsoft these days is to become a manager (or a very hot-shot engineer) --- thus the hyper-competition and gamesmanship.

All that said, if you can kind of settle in and allow for the fact that career development is going to be 20% you and about 80% random factors beyond your control (unless you are truly a master politician and brown-noser), then there's some cool work to be done and decent people to work around.