Company: Microsoft
Date: 2008-09-17
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former

Really smart people in lots of meetings
Pros: The health/med benefits are unmatched and the people I worked with were great.  The employee discounts, the toys, the instant recognition (both good and bad) when you told people where you worked and the belief that you were, even indirectly, making the world better for the majority of end-users.
Cons: The schedule of meetings with no objective followed by post-mortem meetings with the same objective which resulted in the spawning of even more meetings with a similar agenda.  

The review/compensation model needed some tweaking .  Don't negotiate level, negotiate salary.  It was essentially better to come in under-leveled but at the pay you expected and out-perform expectations of you, resulting in a bigger performance bonus and a potential promotion which would then likely include a raise.  Sadly, industry hires that came in appropriately leveled (salary commensurate with skills)  would then be calibrated against everyone else at that level regardless of their tenure almost guaranteeing a less than stellar performance based on expectations of everyone at that level.  To make matters more confounding, unless you're drawing negative attention you probably won't know you're not fully hitting expectations until review and then it's too late.   

Oh, and the parking