Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-12-28
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Like the Stepford Wives, it's a little too good to be true when you start to look closely
Pros: The benefits; a modicum of job security; the opportunity to surround yourself with some of the brightest (but sometimes the most self-absorbed and snarky) people you will ever meet.
Cons: Microsoft is the fabulously wealthy company that squanders every opportunity to meaningfully change the world: losing out on the self-driving car; Internet search; the iPod; smart phones and tablets, social media — a company whose derivative and copycat products the world uses only because we *have* to, not because we love to. The commute to Redmond can be an atrocious time-investment and working from home is cultural discouraged; peak time Connector shuttles are almost always overbooked and the company touts them but doesn't run enough buses. Many managers in power are piranhas and sharks who learned how to survive the much-loathed Stack Ranking system (read Vanity Fair's 2012 article, "Microsoft: The Lost Decade" for full details of the HR system that shaped Microsoft culture).