Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-02-26
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Great company for early in career development, very hard glass ceiling for women.
Pros: Smart people, big goals, end to end solid platform when competing in the industry. Benefits good, but not great relative to younger tech companies. This is a great company for the people who want stability without potential for a strong career trajectory.
Cons: Microsoft is a hard place for women to grow their careers.  There is much talk about diversity in race and gender without much true action. While HR says that pay disparity is less than one percent by gender BY JOB LEVEL, women must note that in many cases they are doing the same job as a man but being paid at a lower level...so it is all semantics. As an example, many female sales managers in the US are level 64. Male sales managers are often level 66. When MSFT says women and men are paid the same by level, in the example above this would mean that L64 female sales managers are paid at the same rate as L64 men...but they leave out that level 64 men are sales reps. Equality would be raising the women to the same level 66 as their male counterparts and paying the same amount for an equal job.  With MSFTs semantics issues, women should start to be concerned with the integrity of the company as it relates to the core company values.  As an employee for nearly two decades always in the top 20%, I personally realized that my values for equality didnt align to the company values.