Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-03-01
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Massive degradation since retirement of Bill Gates
Pros: Brand name, good salary, work from home facilities, good medical reimbursement, free transport to/from home, decent work-life balance
Cons: Politics and regional/linguistic favoritism is the bottom line of this company.
Once legendary Microsoft interviews are now run by temporary HR contractors, who just care about meeting hiring targets. No accountability from senior management about quality of people being recruited. 

Government jobs like concept of "reservation" has silently creeped in the recruiting process - drastically separate levels of technical questions for top colleges(tough interview questions) and 2nd string colleges (cakewalk questions), so that HR can just meet hiring targets.

You have to do buttering to your boss if you want any career growth at all, else you will be branded as "lacking soft skills". Technical skills and your work have zero value.

Rather than working for a common goal of creating great products, the company culture encourages people to step on others head and prove your "visibility", which is nothing but useless chattering and giving junk fundas etc.

As part of cost cutting,  some of the best in-house engineering systems have been blindly demolished. 

So many internal scams going on openly. They have banned team outings beyond 100 km distance but there exist several teams in Hyderabad who make trips to exotic destinations under the disguise of "training" and nobody questions it.

Internal employee survey is simply used as a means to identify and penalise the "complainers" rather than genuinely addressing the issues. After conducting a so-called "anonymous" annual poll, the HR will conduct team-by-team meetings (if team's review is bad) and will try their best to trap people into talking and indetifying those who raised any issues in the poll. Once you are on the radar for giving any negative feedback, your career is a gone case. Have seen at least 6 people being "managed out".

Pathetic degradation of company culture since exit of Bill Gates.