Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-07-17
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Review system promotes the wrong type of competition
Pros: great benefits, decent salary, great products, smart people. The company is good for someone coming in directly from college to learn the ropes as there are a lot of really smart people to learn and grow from when in the beginning of your career.
Cons: review system is detrimental, every person is calibrates and rated against their peers. This system determines bonus, promotions, and lay offs so instead of promote team collaboration, Microsoft promotes backstabbing, political games and internal cat fights.  Every year an obscene amount of time is used by people to write up self assessments or 'sale pitches' for how great they are, and equal amount of time is used by management to rate, calibrate, and justify why A is better than B or C.  Another con is the crazy amount of meetings, sometime you wonder how anyone is supposed to work with 4-6 hours/day in meetings.