Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-08-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Principal Software Engineering Manager
Pros: I was at Microsoft for 4 years in various roles / divisions. 

- World class engineers
- Great pay / benefits.
- Very interesting problems to solve.
- Mega scale challenges and opportunities.
- Satya's changes to make Microsoft focused on being a cloud and services company and starting to embrace open source is the right future.
Cons: Unfortunately I think the cons still outweigh the pros at Microsoft.

- Company culture is in general terrible due to politics, personal career aspirations and brilliant jerks.
- Politics. I can't stress this con enough. People are more concerned about their own career advancement than their team and our customers.
- Brilliant jerks are still promoted and given a lot of influence.
- Work/life balance can be terrible depending on the org.
- Proprietary APIs and custom implementations in Azure that provide the same functionality as open source projects.
- The higher up you move in levels / leadership at Microsoft the more political it gets.
- Reorgs are still frequent, incredibly disruptive and cause a constant exodus of talent.