Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-10-03
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Find a Healthy Team and It Could Be Really Great
Pros: Lots of intelligent people all around you. In most cases, you will be affecting change in the industry that's visible to the world.
Cons: Promotions are few and far between.  You'll get higher jumps in salary if you leave and come back.  They've made a number of missteps in the last few years and have relieved themselves of a lot of industry talent - that has gone to the competition.  They're now trying to recapture this by hiring even more new, young blood.  But while MSFT is an industry leader in some areas, it's starting to ebb significantly (Windows, Phone, Security). Other groups are emerging as the new industry standards (Office 365).  And the remarkably inconsistent leadership has left this otherwise great company rudderless against competition, eager to try broad new initiatives - most with mixed or lackluster results.  The most recent example was a perceived success with Windows Phone (even though it still hasn't caught on with consumers) drove leadership to replace huge swaths of Windows (desktop, server) team leads with Windows Phone leaders (responsible for 4-6M consumer phones) who had little understanding of the enterprise space (1.3B consumer and enterprise devices).  The result has been an abject collision of purposes and assumptions that have resulted in industry-wide fiascos like Windows 8.0, an overall drop in code and update quality and continued misreading of the market.