Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-08-03
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

An amazing place to learn from some of the brightest people.
Pros: The company has so many great people. It is impossible to not learn a ton of stuff every day. They truly embrace a work life balance that is enhanced with great benefits and on-site facilities. It is wonderful to be on a team that releases products that billions of people use and that change the lives of so many.
Cons: The people are stifled by management and great ideas that are easy to come by are seldom developed to their full potential. The rank and yank system made everyone hoard their great ideas and stopped people from helping others. The other major drawback is the companies approach to employees, virtually no one can expect to work a full career there. They have a system in which people prefer to leave after they have all the needed experience to be great and all those great people are replaced by bright, capable college hires that want to change the world but don't have the experience to not reinvent the wheel. Also it is easy to distance themselves from the customer and make decisions with their own intuition rather than customer preference.