Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-05-25
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Hard work, lots of work, good people, tough management
Pros: Being around people like yourself, if you're a tech person. The culture is about technology through and through.  Benefits are really good but not as good as they used to be. My job had lots of travel, which I considered a bonus. Layoffs aren't a problem like in other tech companies these days if you can 'keep to the program', so stability is a built in benefit these days.
Cons: It can be hard to stand out in a sea of 'softies. Stack Rank is something to search for in Google (okay, I meant Bing); the rewards and promotion schedule is a hard way to go. Managers won't stand up for you and everyone has to stick to the hard and fast method of judging individual contributions as set by The Castle in Redmond..   And the work/social interaction you might want is limited once you've joined with Microsoft, as the world is divided into several camps, some of which hate Microsoft and associate you with their prejudice if you have a current badge number. I find that a drag -it's like Northern Ireland with warring factions. Like it's your religion or something.