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 benefits. Redmond campus has some great places to work. Always a ton of interesting problems to solve. Impact on computing, software development, and most anyone who uses a computer is hard to overstate.

Cons: Huge company, not even a company really, but a ton of smaller companies that don't always work well together. Huge products like Windows, Office, etc., can stifle innovation that might lead to competition. Many larger groups are run top-down, and giving feedback can be difficult, especially around arbitrary technical decisions.

Pros: Most people are passionate about creating good products and good experiences for the customer. There are lots of different job opportunities. There are hundreds of teams at Microsoft. You can work on anything from games to mainstream products, to hardware, to research projects. I had jobs in many different groups over my years there because I decided I wanted to try a new product. Also, you can change disciplines. I've seen many people want to change disciplines, and they started getting experience in their current group and either took over the role in their current group or moved to a new group. There are lots of smart people there, and there are.

Cons: Plans can change on an upper management whim. There's no good reason other than someone way up the food chain had a pet idea they wanted in the product. Upper management expects everyone under them to provide schedules and such, but they don't feel they should be held accountable to a schedule. We wait with no idea when the decisions that have a major impact on our product will be made. Schedules get made that everyone knows can't be met, but will only be reported as the official schedule until it's blown.