Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-11-30
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Sea change of improvement requires hard times
Pros: Microsoft has so many resources in talent, money, and market power. When the company or a team decides to do something it will keep trying until it succeeds. In the current reorganization started by Balmer and now run by Nadella there's a lot of consolidation going on that will help drive a leaner& faster company. In a few years this company is going to be a force not seen in a long time and one to rival Google and Apple in terms of pace of innovation and quality of results. 

As an employee you are treated with a lot of respect and provided so many resources from research and design, to developers and user data, and definitely a lot of time to get anything done. There's a lot of systematic approaches to everything so it is normally easy to predict the outcome of any product development if you're paying attention. 

The pay at Microsoft is great, stocks are just ok, but the take home cash pay is generous, especially for new college and industry hires.
Cons: Due to all the reorganization and consolidation going on there's a lot of cutting and hard choices happening now and probably for a while longer. When all is said and done what was cut will likely make a comeback but right now much of the work is focused on table-stakes and platform code cleanup. 

Also, if you want to work on any of the productivity or server products be prepared to find the most challenging job ahead. They're boring because the hurdles are in improving something that millions rely on every single day. Small changes take years to work through. This is can be a fun challenge or nightmarish political hassle depending on your point of view. 

The company and most teams are largely run in a top - down model. Orders are driven down and individual contributors are left to figure out how to get it done whether or not data suggests a decision is good or bad. How development or design progresses outside of the edict can be influenced heavily from the bottom - up and with lots of good data and practice.