Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-05-26
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Politics and stack ranking are a live and well
Pros: Can be a great place to work if you get on the right team. If you get on the wrong team, your career options will be very limited.
Satya is trying to eliminate the bloated management structure but there is much resistance from the management ranks.
Cons: If you don't suck up to management, you will get nowhere. They will even prevent you from moving to another team out of spite. 
I was there for over 7 years and despite all the PR about stack ranking going away, it still exists. In fact, it's even worse now as your direct managers have more impact on your ranking and compensation so, if you don't kiss up to them, you get nothing. 
In fact, MS has been reducing all the benefits given to employees over the years. 
There used to be a top-notch benefit package and now you have co-pays and deductibles. They used to give you a hiring bonus and now that is apparently gone. 
Food in the cafeteria used to be cheap. Now it's more expensive than eating out somewhere else.
Free soda was offered in cans. Now we get fountain soda so they can save money.
Managements response to Satya's announcement of layoffs intended to reduce management bloat that exists at MS on my team, was to instead fire a bunch of FTEs and replace them with contingent staff because they work for less money, all in an effort to keep their cushy jobs.
Management is clueless to how much one contributes to the team. Instead of focusing on their reports, they have meetings every day with each other and rely on reports that are inaccurate and what an engineer puts on their check-in. You can put anything on there and there is no follow-up on the success of the project. So, you have a bunch of people putting meaningless garbage on their reviews for projects that exist for no reason other than to put something on the review. I lost count of the number of projects I got involved in, thinking it was going to help make a difference, only to have it disappear off the face of the earth all of a sudden.