Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-12-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

An uphill battle for anyone not from an engineering background.
Pros: Excellent compensation, both in salary and benefits. Exposure to cutting edge technologies, as well as brilliant minds, across a variety of media. Large amount of personal freedom, tempered with responsibility.
Cons: Review system is counter-productive to innovation, morale, cooperation, and retention of top talent. Company's size makes it slow to change process towards something more nimble and competitive. Regular workers often fall victim to executive turf wars. While MS claims to be moving towards "product focus" and "valuing design," very few people on senior leadership team truly understand what this means and are able to manage this change appropriately; despite its marketing, it's still a deeply entrenched engineering company. Terrible work/life balance.