Pros: Work-life balance. Free snacks and fruits. Excellent peer workers.

Cons: Limited choices over the project or team that you want to work on.

Pros: Most of the people here are really smart. There's so much going on at the company and they've been at this forever - Microsoft knows how to ship a product. The volume of information (and professional development resources) available to employees is enormous. If you want to work on products the entire world uses, look no further. Compensation and benefits are both very good. There's a lot of emphasis put on individual career development. In terms of social responsibility, they're very generous and proactive re: corporate giving and volunteer work.

Cons: There can be a lot of red tape. Sometimes you can get the feeling that you're spending more time talking about what is going to be done than actually doing it. This is both good and bad: your plan is always rock solid, but because of all the time spent planning, you have less time for the work itself. Depending on the team, there can be pressure to "just get the job done," whether or not that means working reasonable hours. In my experience, this is cyclical. There can also be politics to deal with, since, after all, this is a big company. There can be reluctance to embrace non-Microsoft technologies, particularly open-source ones. Some of this is valid from a legal perspective (Microsoft is a big target and can get away with a lot less than a smaller company which is off the radar), but regardless of the actual reasons, this can make it take longer to get the job done.

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.