Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-01-12
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

BigCo benefits, BigCo problems
Pros: Good balance of compensation vs effort to meet performance expectations, good work/life flexibility, potential for variety of work, company's strong financial position. 

Microsoft is a great place to have a lifestyle career that lets you work with fun/interesting people and focus your time/money on kids, hobbies or extracurricular projects.
Cons: If you're a high-performer looking to work harder and grow faster, this company probably isn't for you. Microsoft is many smart people behaving below their intellect -- this seems to be rooted in poor accountability and a failure to reward meaningful business outcomes and discourage meaningless ones. Likely on account of its size, the company struggles to manage employee performance and cultivate genuine leadership talent in mid and senior levels of the company; it's just to easy for non-contributors to blend in.