Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-02-14
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

My experience at Microsoft has been very good.
Pros: Microsoft offer some really good perks. The base salary is good and the ESPP(employee stock purchase plan) is well designed. The health benefits were very good in past but they are not as good as they used to be. 
You get to work on some really challenging projects. You have to keep learning and updating yourself at your job. This is not something that you do in your off time. You have to learn new technologies to perform your day-to-day work. 
Some of the people here are very talented. They are scary intelligent and you have a hard time to gauge their potential. A wide range of employees are average but average for Microsoft may be extra ordinary for some other companies.
Cons: The work-life balance is very off. We have frequent releases and every release brings long hours at office.
Sometimes, we don't have enough time to fix a problem at the very core. We are racing against time and we have to provide a workable solution to the problem as soon as possible. 
There are very few team morale events.