Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-09-07
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

A black hole for business people
Pros: Good, generally smart, wordly people who are serious about doing a job well.  Great lifestyle company.  The benefits are degrading rapidly but are still pretty good.
Cons: Too much management; too much worship of technology and too little concern with user experience.  The organization worships developers and exists to promote them upwards.  Business people are basically hired help to act as drone labor in the process but lack ladders to climb into upper management. As a result the place is filled with coders who think they are business people because they got promoted. In recent years the place is adopting a grass-is-greener hiring policy, lots of people coming in from outside Microsoft at partner (GM) level - practically impossible if you already work within its walls.  This naturally kills motivation and builds resentment.  The recent critique on the performance evaluation system is fairly accurate.