Pros: Lots of different projects going on. Well-established and stable. A good place to start your career. Lots of free software (and games if you work in Xbox).

Cons: Lots of "old guard" employees who like doing things the way they've always been done. Lots of re-orgs, lots of moves. Hard to get out from under poor management. Very bureaucratic.

Pros: The benefits package is really, really good: health, gym (Pro Club), fringe benefits, etc. Coworkers - intelligence, personalities. Devs get their own office.

Cons: - On-call rotation: Maintaining a large online service regularly woke me up at night with service errors. - Big company / red tape: Sometimes abounds, both for development of features and getting logistical stuff done.

Pros: - Good work-life balance, ~36-40 hour work week, respect for vacation time, etc. - Some extremely smart people around to learn from, especially when it comes to developing real-time, low-latency systems. - Really spacious, cool campus with a lot of little perks.

Cons: Everyone spends most of their time on frivolous busywork: meetings, manually sideloading files because the proper build process takes too long, refactoring code, or dealing with forced refactoring. It's so bad that there's actually a term for meaningful work to distinguish it from normal daily tasks: "Impact". You're "making an impact" if you manage to actually do something that will improve customers' experiences or make other engineers more productive rather than waste more of their time. FYI, at most companies I've worked with, "Impact" is the standard. A lack of impact results in termination of the employee, team, or the entire company itself. Microsoft under Satya Nadella is paying lip service to the philosophy that made Microsoft great in the first place and has been serving other companies so well recently. But in practice, the company is a bloated, ineffectual behemoth of failure. Most of the people who brought the tech industry to its knees in the 80s and 90s got rich and got out. They trained a generation of quiet, useless busybodies to replace themselves. Anyone with any passion or dedication to quality got slowly extruded out the back end of the company over the last 20 years, until we got to this point where Microsoft abandons and reboots their failed phone platform every two years. They make laughably terrible moves like removing the Start Button and forcing updates on people mid-presentation.