Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-02-20
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great Company To Work For (Sans Politics)
Pros: Great company with lots of benefits. Healthcare package, discounts all around town. Global presence. Get to interact with a diverse crowd. The company promotes its employees sharing each others' cultures and ideas through alias lists.
Cons: 1. A bit too top-heavy. Too many "managers" who don't do much more than report and babysit. 2. One of the biggest failures of Microsoft is in their annual review process. That makes or breaks your career in the company and you are in competition with your own team! So in order to get the best annual review, you HAVE to step on your colleagues. 3. Poor feedback mechanism. They do NOT take criticism very well, neither internally nor from external customers. I've suggested a more robust feedback tracking mechanism for years. 4. Microsoft "help" is most often no help at all. What they should do is link from these "help" pages to the blogs page which addresses these topics. More examples, less technical jargon. If  you really want help with anything Microsoft, it's a LOT more productive to Google it than go through help online. 5. The biggest fat to trim is upper management. They create these layers of useless lower managers to pass the buck on to and insulate their positions. Then, to make themselves seem like they're doing something important, they'll "revamp" the process in a cyclical fashion. "Silos good, silos bad, silos good, silos bad..." There is just too much of this type of nonsense going on within the company which is not helping anyone.