Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-02-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Detached
Pros: The salary here is great. You will undoubtedly have some great, fun, funny and intelligent people surrounding you. Benefits are OK.
Cons: The company is obviously very large and thus makes it very difficult for groups and departments to get things done.
The communication between departments is absolutely horrible which causes projects to get delayed, sidetracked or just cancelled very often. This also leads to a redundant workload that has possibly even been done by another team!

There is way to much of an engineering driven culture at Microsoft which tends to make the product or service you work on very bland and unintuitive.

To say the company is risk adverse is an understatement. If you are looking to create something new and exciting then this isn't the place for you. Get ready to iterate on unlikely/unrealistic scenarios that pander to business needs much more that the people that use them.

There is very much a 'live to work' mentality at Microsoft rather than a 'work to live' mentality. This leads to stressed out teams and even more stressed managers. 

There isn't a vision of where the company is going in departments let alone at a company level. This can be very uninspiring.