Pros: It's obviously an established and well-rounded company with plenty of smart people to work with and learn from. The company focuses very hard on career development and tries to help you maximize your productivity. A lot of people complain about one thing or another, but the bottom line is that they take good care of you in numerous ways.

Cons: There is a very high bureaucracy tax. There are many re-orgs to sidetrack entire teams, and individual obstacles (crazy frameworks for everything) are all over the place. You have to be half-politician to have a successful career here, and the review process can be either lucrative or maddeningly arbitrary and painful (depending on many factors out of your control). It's a great place for people who want to drink the Kool-Aid and settle and be comfortable, and it can be frustrating for others.

Pros: There are some very smart people here and some very interesting technology. Lots of fun techie toys to play with in the course of your job, and a decent amount of support (sometimes) for doing things in new and better ways. The pay is decent, if you can avoid getting screwed over by the recruiter when you first start. Work-life balance is typically respected, and it's extremely easy to get time off or work flex time when you need to. The locale is good, with lots of things to do when you aren't working. Plus, you get to make Balmer Chair jokes.

Cons: The review and promotion system is pretty obviously designed to pit employees against each other. Like grading on a curve, which makes no sense if you want to hire a bunch of really smart people and keep them all motivated and happy. Management is fumbling and confused, and seemingly care more about making one or two feel-good changes they can put their name on and leverage into a better position elsewhere than actually improving products or the business. Oftentimes lip service is paid to "Engineering Excellence", and then scrapped immediately when Bizdev remembers something they should have told you months earlier. Good work goes unnoticed unless it's on some shiny, highly visible area; which is fine, except that it creates an environment where the basics aren't attended to because they're a career dead end and nobody wants to take that hit. Finally, hiring standards have lowered drastically in the past several years, so there are a lot of people who really shouldn't be working there but are now impossible to get rid of. At least they help pad out the lower end of the review scale.

Pros: Great work environment, amazing benefits, and a wide variety of career opportunities.

Cons: Company perception to the outside world; marketing.