Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-10-22
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

It's the engineers who make it great
Pros: There is a very strong engineering culture in product development, with brilliant people doing great things.  The current culture from the top-down is the right one, and the focus on building great products over building something for a salesperson to sell is wonderful.  The company is moving towards embracing open source, which is huge.  Under the right management you can be empowered to act on things that matter to you, and that's critical.  The work is interesting, the problems are challenging, and the scale is one where millions of users are affected.  You can have a tremendous impact if you bias towards action, place yourself under good management, and work with engineering as much as possible.
Cons: There are still remnants of "Ballmer's Microsoft" in places, where people are still acting in old ways.  Some people still don't "get" open source, and hate the very idea of it.  Luckily, you can usually ignore them and get your job done anyways.  When you have to do work that doesn't involve engineers, there's a good chance that you'll waste a lot of time talking about something without ever doing anything.  If you find yourself in that situation a lot, you need to change your role ASAP.