Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-03-24
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

forced curve stack ranking is brutal for regular employees. Cushy ride for managers
Pros: good name recognition in your resume. get an idea of the scale of work in a big company.
If you are a manager it is cushy ride. If you are an employee very difficult for a developer due to constant deadlines and demands, OK for program manager and testers
Cons: too much process and bureaucratic. constant change in direction is normal. Common to reset the project direction every few months and start from scratch. Stack ranking (where employees are compared to each other in their level every few months and forced into a curve distribution) is brutal. If you are a developer here, you don't feel like you are competing with the other companies to deliver a better product , instead you are competing with your coworker. Coworkers will not help each other, instead will backstab each other so that they finish higher in the curve. It is a bit easier if you are a program manager, because you don't have any real deadlines. Developers have a deadline almost daily  and put in crazy hours in most teams. Also easier if you are a lead, since you typically would delegate all work to reports, get credit for all successes but are typically not blamed for project failures,

Manager has to fill up a slot between 1 to 5 (performance grade) in their team by force. This is called stack ranking and is very political. About 2 months of the year, managers just spend time doing that. Typically they pick least favorite employees for 4 or 5 . And by HR rule , they have to contantly tell them they are underperforming so that those employees leave soon. Also internal transfers are only possible for people who get 1 or 2 rating. The other employees are ignored during internal applications.

There are also many ethnic cabals inside there. 
There is also an official internal effort to force out older employees and replace they with younger employees. For managers though, there is no such effort. Managers are treated as gods by the company.