Pros: Can't beat the work-life balance with a low-stress environment, high brand recognition. Product audience means your work can have impact (if you can fight the technical and political challenges to make meaningful progress).

Cons: Deep hierarchy with not much variation in promotion velocity (people get awarded titles for tenure length). Employees tend to ignore emails from junior employees without impressive titles. Very political, high complacency, a lot of apathy and "rest and vest"ers.

Pros: Great work-life balance (nearly everyone is out of the office by 5). Microsoft pays its workers extremely well to make up for its work environment. Easy work, lots of benefits, free soft drinks. Family-friendly tech company.

Cons: Very hard to change teams, excessive internal politics. Managers intentionally assign you less challenging work to allow their favorites excel at your expense. Anti-intellectual "brogrammer" culture. Extreme hostility to open source. Weird looks for not owning a Windows phone. Culture of groupthink where you can't challenge decisions made in meetings. Sink-or-swim review system pits you against your immediate coworkers and encourages cut-throat competitive behavior. Senior developers use code reviews to gang up on and haze newbies with "moving target" coding style comments. Dying company that serially releases market failures. PPO healthcare was cut by Ballmer/Brummel. Food is not free, and cafeterias do not accept credit cards. Coworkers are incompetent developers with big mouths who are good at playing politics.

Pros: Chance to work together with smart people; lots of opportunity to get training; a mature platform for young professionals to promote themselves.

Cons: have to fit into an existing framework, because there are big dependencies between what you do and what your colleagues do.