Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-04-11
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great benefits, boring and unfilling job
Pros: The hours were great.  I worked from 8 to 3 everyday.  A lot of people in my group worked a ton of hours but I felt that they were doing mostly BS work such as spending a lot of time tweaking numbers on a Excel spreadsheet that they would then copy and paste into a PowerPoint that no would be able to read anyway.  I never understood why people spent so much time on presentation that were still so terrible in the end.

The benefits were also great.  I don't have kids, but it seemed great for people with kids.  If your kid gets sick, you can just work from home for a day.  The flexibility is amazing.

In general, work life balance at Microsoft is great for the life part of the equation, but not so great for the work part of it.
Cons: I hear this is different at other parts of the company but I was working in the US M&O.  It's supposedly a marketing group but no marketing gets done.  People mostly spend their time trying to wave their arms so their manager or manager's manager feels that marketing is being accomplished.  It's the biggest waste of time I've ever seen.