Vantaggi
Microsoft has some of the best talent in the world, very smart, competent and technical co-workers. The pay is good, the benefits unmatched by any other employer I know of or could find at glassdoor. The campus is pretty, our tools and equipment excellent. The company has a career plan for all disciplines and formal evaluation reviews in an honest effort to improve people management and reward distribution. Our products reach millions of users and power most companies of all sizes around the world. Microsoft is fiscally conservative and relatively prudent on investments. If you want to learn how a massive company can be managed, it is a good place to work.
Svantaggi
The MBA crowd is taking over the company. I don't know if that is a bad thing for shareholders and customers, but it is definitively less fun than it was. I had enough litigation, IP protection and diversity training to put an elephant to sleep. Product are designed around political lines and networking than on user requirements and technical merits. Information flows slowly and middle management add a lot of noise. Decisions are more and more attached to people's seniority than ideas - as a senior employee myself I think we lose the opportunity to innovate and are creating a suffocating bureaucracy. Everything you do at Microsoft has a tax - there is nothing small or focused. Everything has to be designed and planned to satisfy 80% of the requirements of everybody, if if you delight no one. There is a force field around the product group that isolate them from real customers and real feedback. In short, it is a HUGE company with no cross team coordination, more and more built in the image of the traditional corporation. We will become GE or IBM in 5-10 years depending on how lucky we are.