Pros: 1. My immediate management was top-notch with regards to transparency on job performance as well as feature work. 2. Tremendous benefits. 3. Good work/life balance.

Cons: 1. Some groups still ship once in years, and the feature may get canceled. 2. Not sure what senior management is ever up to. Strategy changes every six months, with a lack of accountability on the part of senior management. 3. Not much scope for innovation.

Pros: College hires or junior employees will probably have 5 to 10 *good* years at Microsoft. If you're not on the "management track" or senior level by then, it will serve you best to move on to new things. By that time, the experience gained will help you to be more successful elsewhere. The most important thing you can learn here is how to make enterprise software scalable and best practices in engineering.

Cons: In many orgs, team dynamics are just bad. Too much bloat in process and personnel. The culture is highly dependent on email, even within teams sitting together in the same building. Many teams struggle to implement lean/agile effectively. About two-thirds of Program Managers seem to be clueless and do not have any real accountability. The middle management culture is risk-averse and has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The worst part is many of those middle managers float around the company, transferring from group to group without passion or fresh ideas. Because of that churn, in most orgs, there will be morale-killing and sometimes pointless re-orgs a couple times each year. Depending on your manager, you may periodically have some anxiety about Microsoft's notoriously Darwinian performance review system.

Pros: There are truly brilliant people at Microsoft, and lots of passion in the air.

Cons: Review system politics. You survived the 99% cutoff rate of interviews and racked up lots of experience, shipped some products, patented ideas, added innovative features, saved the day, etc. But now you're in a rough patch at work and find yourself in the bottom 10-20% of the review pool due to "metrics" and personality issues, and you are headed for eviction. Perhaps you'd like the opportunity to interview with another team? You'd better interview with Google or Apple, because your internal record won't allow you to stay at Microsoft. And once you get one bad review, you bet you won't pull yourself out of the hole.