Pros: Good work-life balance if you can get housing nearby. Opportunity to work with individuals from diverse backgrounds. With Balmer's departure, things can only get better.

Cons: Salary is so-so. Middle management culture. Traffic in greater Seattle is a nightmare.

Pros: Flexible work hours, awesome facilities like Proclub Sports membership, Prime card to avail discounts at various places, and great insurance coverage for self and family.

Cons: Work pressure at times, tough competition in the job for progressing.

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.