Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-11-25
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Great company to work for, rapidly changing culture driven by new CEO
Pros: Great company to work for, good compensation in fixed salary & bonusses. Good carreer opportunities in the subsidiaries, area level and corp. Broad customer base consisting of end user consumers,  small & medium businesses, enterprise customers, partners etc. Very broad product portfolio ranging from Operating Systems, Mobility products, productivity software, gaming (Xbox) and cloud services. Culture is rapidly changing into an open, collaborative culture driven by the new CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft got rid of the dreaded stack ranking and this instantly changed the culture for the better. Employees have a firm believe that they can win the next era and recent products seem to support that believe (Windows 10, Office 365, Xbox One, Microsoft Band etc.)
Cons: COO Kevin Turner has agressively pushed a scorecard based culture in the organization resulting in behavior where employees only focus on making the scorecard green. If it's not on the scorecard, people tend to ignore it (even though it is an important product for Microsoft). If you are responsible for a product or proposition which is not reflected in the scorecard you will have a difficult year. Work/Life balance can be a challenge.