Company: Microsoft
Date: 2010-05-15
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Great benefits, but they come at a price
Pros: The benefits at Microsoft can't be beat. I haven't paid for health-related costs in the ten years I've been there.  The company is also incredibly diverse, giving you lots of options for moving around to different disciplines and products.  And the resources you have available to you are pretty unbeatable (funding, etc).
Cons: Microsoft suffers from a few systemic problems that make it an increasingly miserable place to work.  

First, people management is an under-appreciated discipline at Microsoft.  Instead of promoting employees who are truly interested in and have a talent for management, the company simply promotes the smartest, most accomplished individual contributors into leadership positions.  This creates an environment where managers spend much of their time continuing to work as individual contributors (where there natural talents lie), and neglect the critical tasks of managing and leading their teams.

Second, Microsoft has always prided itself on hiring the "best and the brightest."  This, unfortunately, has been taken to an extreme.  The company has a weakness for people who are undoubtedly smart, but often socially inept and acutely uncollaborative.  Having worked in both engineering and marketing organizations, it's a problem that spans multiple disciplines at the company.  This can make it a very frustrating place to work.  Meetings get mired in arguments over esoteric details instead of focusing on the "big picture", decisions get postponed or constantly revisited because someone is always uncovering new information that needs to be analyzed to the nth degree, and innovation grinds to a crawl amid people more interested in proving that they're smarter than the guy next to them, instead of working together toward a common goal.  As these "best and brightest" inevitably get promoted, these problems are only exacerbated at more senior levels of the company.

Finally, the company is hypocritical in its approach to managing attrition.  On one hand, Microsoft is ruthless in how it manages "middle of the road" performers.  People who are good at what they do and enjoy their work, but  who aren't interested in climbing the corporate ladder, are often ranked in the "bottom 10%" of the company during annual review.  This sends the wrong message to solid performers, and severely hurts their chances of finding other positions within the company.  On the other hand, human resources policies and corporate fears of litigation make it nearly impossible to fire people who truly are under-performers.  Having worked in the public and private sectors, I found it substantially easier to fire people from government positions than from Microsoft.