Company: Microsoft
Date: 2008-11-11
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Software engineer at Microsoft
Pros: MS is a financially stable company with variety of software jobs spanning multiple computer science disciplines. Stock awards and benefits increase over time. So the pay is good for long timers. Vacation increases as well to 4 weeks. Benefits are already generous.
Cons: Its a slower company and many groups have friction against various new things. Domain knowledge is not well rewarded, generic skills such as data structures, C++, windows system programming etc have much higher reward during recruitment in particular. 
Pay is not bad but increasing the base salary meaningfully is really difficult unless you gain promotions regularly. So keep up the hard work and learn new things that are valued here.