Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-03-29
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great Company but avoid the consulting services practice
Pros: Microsoft provides you with plenty of opportunities to grow your career. You can move from one business practice to another if you feel another job may be a better fit for your career ambitions. You get a lot of training opportunities to sharpen both your technical and soft skills. Access to many online training and research materials for technical and sales specific roles. Good pay and benefits, and MSDN subscription. Great campus environment and learning facilities. Lots of technical and social events to network and mingle with your fellow Microsoft employees and leadership.
Cons: Its very charming to join Microsoft but the consulting practice, specially the public sector services practice is not the best place to join, at least based on my own personal experience. If you are looking to work for Microsoft and want to grow your career, try to join the other business and product groups. 

Consultants are expected to work on multiple projects to meet sometimes difficult utilization goals and held accountable even if their main job is to deliver and not sell. You will be expected to travel 100%. Instead of complementing the great products Microsoft makes, there is too much focus on quantity then quality which is doing nothing but hurting the Microsoft brand. 

You will not be rewarded for your extra contributions and keeping customers happy, and helping grow the business even if you miss on a single negligible operational/administration commitment. Microsoft has done away with the stack ranking model but unfortunately some leadership in the consulting practice is still using this model.