Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-12-11
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Beware of vestiges of stack ranking
Pros: Great benefits
Get to develop leading edge technologies with huge impact
Diverse problems to solve
Cons: Stack ranking makes team mates your competition and incites turf wars.
Stack ranking can lead to a vicious cycle: Since stack ranking works like a highly stochastic merge sort, if you are a good contributor on a team with superb teammates working on a risky project that does not pan out, you will likely get a poor review, which happened to me after initial good reviews. Being the last rat to leave the sinking ship, I watched my teammates leave for other teams and companies. My poor rating made it impossible to leave my team and lead to continued poor ratings, so I eventually left under duress.