Company: Microsoft
Date: 2019-01-17
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great opportunities for young hardware engineers
Pros: Small yet highly talented HW engineering community: I was surrounded by exceptionally bright and capable coworkers, I learned a lot from multiple mentors.

Exciting Hardware projects: Surface, Xbox, Hololens are all big in SVC, tons of exciting, technically challenging work to cut your teeth on.

Good work-life balance and perks (at Silicon Valley campus) including fitness classes led by instructors, catered bfast/lunch, and dinners when staying late (depends on org).

Travel opportunities: Redmond, international partners, China, etc.

Good benefits: 401k matching, employee stock purchase discount, yearly fitness equipment reimbursement, PRIME card, commuter card.
Cons: Many, many layers of management - expect 6-9 layers of management between you and CEO - making it difficult for cultural changes to trickle down through the org.

Because of the many layers, a lot of your day-to-day depends on your direct manager.  Mitigated by ease of moving internally.

Program manager heavy - many PM's overseeing schedule, but over the 4 years that I was there, I saw the same scheduling mistakes occur constantly.

Redmond calls the shots.  If you're at a satellite campus and want to pitch program/project ideas, you will be flying into Seattle a lot.