Pros: Things are changing for the best, slowly. Great benefits; good work-life balance. The company loves its employees. Lots of great projects and some amazing teams, if you can find them. Great people overall.

Cons: Still a lot of large, slow teams. Still a lot of politics; low risk-taking culture.

Pros: Vast array of products and technical areas. Large network of smart professionals. Excellent salary and compensation.

Cons: Slow moving. Employees are not at the cutting edge of tech (e.g., social, mobile, context-aware computing, etc.).

Pros: Scope - MS has the biggest scope of opportunity for a talented software engineer tired of working in networking. Try security, or games, or Windows, or Office, or robotics, or research. There aren't many serious industry players that can offer that. Location - The Pacific Northwest is a great place to work. Attitude - When applied correctly (and they sometimes are!), the company's values make it a great place to work. I'm not really talking about the free soda or healthcare, more the open environment that can allow smart people to really work together and produce. Scale - Maybe this is just scope in a different light, but the company is big enough and diverse enough that I can see other teams doing very varied work.

Cons: Talks down to its staff. Amazing. MS has (or thinks that it has) an effective recruitment and interview process, which is meant to bring in smart employees. In my experience, it does. Then, having recruited all these "smart" employees, the company, in any and all official communication with them, talks down to them like they are idiots. Grrr.