Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-10-16
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Had great health care... "Senior+" level jobs are all about politics
Pros: - ProClub membership
- Health care used to be excellent, now is pretty comparable to any A-grade employer
- SSDP (same sex domestic partner) health care which is good for some
- Lots of different areas so you can basically change job and it's just like changing company
- Divisions are almost run as their own enterprises - so moving from Windows to Office or SQL is like a totally different experience
- There are a lot of smart people @ MS (and some not so smart, see below comment)
Cons: - Performance review is bell-curve based
- The new (1-5) versus 20/70/10 rating system really blows
- From "Senior" band (L63) and above the job is more politics and less working - found that you need to spend almost 50% of your time on "influence" especially the 6 months before review/stack ranking on ensuring your name is "out there" to make sure you don't get screwed at review time
- For an IT company, a lot of the internal IT systems totally suck so you can spend half a day just to order a new keyboard
- Your career's trajectory is closely aligned to your managers and your managers manager (skip level), if you join a group where the principle / director has already been at MS forever and is on cruise mode then expect your career isn't going to go very far
- If you don't like the job you are in, you need manager approval (I've never seen it given) to switch jobs in your first 18 months in the role.  Even for new hires, you can just quit and join another company without repaying sign-on etc after 12 months, so this leads to a lot of people leaving after 366 days
- no motivation of your manager to find the "best job" for you in Microsoft, they only focus on who is in their team... so, some star performers join the org but get trapped in a job that isn't the most suited for them which gets them disgruntled and out the door: rather than fighting for them to get a job where they could make a real difference and impact for MS
- lots of Program Managers, lots of Marketing speak, lots of perception management and a lot less engineering than I expected.
- Microsoft doesn't pay stellar wages and as such you may find you're not working with the sharpest tools in the shed in some teams... although there ARE _some_ really smart people around 
- a lot of old timers just hang around because they have >$20k annual stock vests and don't have the hunger or motivation to do great things... it's very 9-5, which is good if you just want a cruisy job, but not if you want to go to a pumped up tech company: in this case go with Google or Facebook.