Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-07-16
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Corrupt Plutocracy over-rewards those at the top at the cost of everyone else, including customers
Pros: The benefits are great, and the campus is a beautiful place to work.
Cons: Review system is extraordinarily painful, demoralizing and unnecessary.

Culture is that all 'real' work is done by vendors, so in order to succeed you have to have skills in finding money to pay for them. Forget anything you've learned about technology -- you'll rarely use it in your real work. Outside employers know this, and it makes it very hard for you to find good work if you ever want to leave -- they want people who do real work, and not overpaid administrators, which your career will quickly become at MSFT.

If you are an individual contributor, regardless of your pay scale, when it comes to review time, you are last, meaning you are getting the bonus/stock crumbs from the table. 

Ballmer's recent re-org only emphasizes the point that the crew at the top have no idea of what is going on down in the trenches, they believe that by moving a few senior execs around that they can fix things. They're wrong.