Company: Microsoft
Date: 2010-08-30
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

You work here for intellectual rewards more than anything else
Pros: Fantastic benefits and perks (gym pass, the Connector bus, Prime card, etc. etc)
Excellent process that encourages intra-company moves
Can work on world-changing software. Or not. Your choice, really.
Can rotate and try multiple roles within reason.
Excellent internal training programs
Coworkers
Cons: Upward mobility is very slow unless one is in the 95th %ile of peer group
Grading/review curve is the bane of employee morale more often than not
Mistakes (wrong group, wrong project, wrong manager) take a long time to erase from your internal career 'memory'
Test/dev/PM silos end up costing agility and create turf
Innovation, while it exists in bundles, is somewhat haphazard and it feels like the company is constantly chasing taillights in many areas.
Need a new/hardcore visionary to drive our consumer software/services vision