Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-11-09
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Can be amazing or awful
Pros: - Many brilliant people
- Incredibly broad product range - if it's tech and you're interested in it, Microsoft works on it
- Opportunities for synergy - when different product lines work well together, amazing things can result.
- Growth-oriented culture: the company (mostly) knows it's behind and needs to do better, and there is a great openness to change and feedback.
- Benefits: all sorts of great benefits, from very good health care to free gym membership to bicycle commuter reimbursement, they take care of you pretty much any way they can think of (except no free food, which apparently is due to the lack of cafeteria space).
- Giving campaign: Microsoft gives the most money per capita to charity of any company. And no, Bill Gates doesn't count towards that :).
- Satya Nadella appears to be a good CEO. He is open to innovation, to change, in a way that Ballmer wasn't, and he's generated a lot of positive sentiment around the company.
- Pay is competitive. Others may pay somewhat more but it's all enough that pay isn't the deciding factor.
- Flexible hours, decent work-life balance in most groups
Cons: - Bureaucracy: the company still feels big, old, and heavy. Everything needs a million approvals, and people get back to you slowly.
- Are we going to make it? The company is way behind in many markets and may not come back. There is enough cash in the bank to last forever, but there will be a point of no return well before the money runs out.
- Some products *suck*, and you're expected to use them anyway. It's also really embarrassing and demoralizing to make crappy products. 
- "Kool aid": many people internally seem to think our products are much better than they are. There is a vocal feedback culture telling them the products suck, but some teams aren't listening. This can be extremely frustrating.
- Management is inconsistent. Many divisions and individual managers are excellent, but there are also giant pockets of rottenness, ranging from HR-type problems to poor feedback to over-focusing on short-term results to simple poor decision making. If you're coming to work here, make sure your manager is solid. Of the orgs I'm familiar with, I would recommend the C+E organization (Azure) and disrecommend Microsoft IT (highly political).
- Slow to promote/give raises, causing many good employees to bounce to competitors for a while, then back, in order to get their fair market wage.
- There are a bunch of old-timers who still don't get it and act like it's 2002 and we own the world. They aren't doing well and are slowly getting pushed out, but they're still around annoying the rest of us.