Pros: The people are extremely smart, motivated, and fun to work with.

Cons: The company is not truly invested in growing employees to be what they want. Rather, they want to grow us to be more efficient where we currently are. For example, there is a long, dry gulch between the SDET and SDE roles. Even though some people have made the transition successfully, there is active discouragement by test leadership when attempting to make this transition. The company is lost trying to make money and has become scared to do anything innovative. The coolest products are handcuffed to profitability expectations before the idea is even baked, causing the best ideas to never bubble to the top. Since there is such a high technical bar, incompetence moves into leadership to survive, which leads to the laziest workers in the middle. The review process is a joke. Can you say bell curve?

Pros: Great benefit, huge career opportunities, variety of people & technologies. You may come across many smart individuals. It's amazing to see the depth & breadth of technologies & people they have. Each group/organization is like a company within a company. They have completely different working styles, technologies, people skills & possibly evaluation processes. Upper management & HR are really working hard to make it a better place to work, but I think they don't realize that the real bottleneck is their hierarchy & too many managers. Company with a great history & big name, so you can be proud of it when you go home.

Cons: Having a bad manager, which often happens, can screw up your career and growth at Microsoft. There is a clear lobby in organizations like Office and Windows. I haven't seen such things in Live/MSN. I would love to work for this company if they got rid of leads and managers who are just playing games, checking emails, and giving big management lectures without having any technical insight. Too much hierarchy gets in the way of the company's progress and decision-making process. Also, leads and managers tend to have favorites of their own without any specific work-related reasons, so if you are not one of them, then good luck! Also, don't expect much once you have joined this company; bonus and stock awards are peanuts compared to what you can get outside. In short, a great place to work for, but filled with tons of bad managers.

Pros: Respect your knowledge and expand the experience.

Cons: need to work with the same technology