Pros: Good place to work!

Cons: Good offices and good food.

Pros: Work-life balance is great, and the benefits are as well.

Cons: Limited upward mobility due to politics.

Pros: Great perks and benefits. If you do the bare minimum and can ship code, this is a place you can collect a decent paycheck and coast pretty much forever. Coworkers are generally good people and nondiscriminatory.

Cons: Microsoft's senior leadership talks a good game, but working on a team day to day doesn't reflect the reality. Too many egotistical, toxic senior engineers who have coasted for years and siloed domain knowledge, and are "too technical" to let go, are the ones who truly run the show. Pray you don't find yourself on a team with one of these. Outdated tools for building and deploying mean even simple, straightforward changes are painful to get through, doubly so for legacy products. Lateral moves are completely self-driven. Nobody really cares about your individual career advancement. Managers are too stressed to do anything but get their features shipped in time. People rave about the WLB, but this is entirely team dependent and individually driven. I often see people arrive before 8 AM and not leave until past 7 PM. Long meetings. Inefficient meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings, where people tend to ask "smart" questions and nothing really productive comes out of it.