Vantaggi
As a company Microsoft has great benefits and good pay. It’s a beautiful campus (soccer and softball fields, sand volleyball courts, trails etc…). Microsoft also has a lot of products. It is one of the few companies where you can work on an OS, developer tools, database engines, cloud services and games. If you get tired of working on one product you can move teams to work on something entirely different. You also get the opportunity to work with really smart people who have the same passion and technical interests that you do. Building software is Microsoft’s business. It’s not an IT or hardware shop it is a software company.
Svantaggi
Management is not honest or open. I found out about a change in my position\team structure by seeing an email distribution list. My manager at the time could not be bothered to tell me I had to make an appointment with him to find out. You can be surprised in your reviews. Very clique’ ish, if you are not in the same clique’ as you manager get out of that team and find a new one. There are way too many managers who can not write code, although they like to think they can. Managers can be very demeaning to individuals. I had one manager tell me that the best management book he had ever read was a book on raising children. Even the current CEO, Satya Nadella, has made a similar reference. This is very insulting. I’m an adult you should treat me like one. Microsoft is not an innovative company. When I joined the company the industry was reading books explain how Microsoft ships software. Of course the industry has passed Microsoft by and now Microsoft is not even mentioned in article that describe the direction the industry is taking.