Microsoft

The benefits are very good. Like everyone else, they are trying to cut costs, but still, they were above average in the industry. I moved from Microsoft to Google, and definitely, the medical benefits and most others are the same.

Company is huge, so there is a lot of space to find interesting projects in almost any computer science field.

Company invests in teaching. There is an entire division dedicated to internal education, and you can learn a lot if you are driven and plan your time well. You get time off for this, so it is not double duty.

In my experience, the people are professional and friendly, especially if you are an engineer up to mid-level management (dev leads, dev managers).

Ballmer is gone. The new guy, Satya, seems to know what he is doing. I get this from the many friends I have left at Microsoft and from watching the public moves the company makes.

They are strongly positioned to take advantage of the cloud revolution (Azure is a distant number two after Amazon).

• There is some politics from mid-level up (quite a lot). This affects everybody because it results in teams being realigned, moved around, competing projects, etc.

• The company has two cash cows struggling. The Windows ecosystem (outside of cloud) is disappearing, and Office has some stiff competition. But they are trying to do the right thing.

• The company is still recovering from the huge mishandling of its mobile presence (the Nokia deal, the Windows Phone OS going nowhere, etc.).

• Ship often (no more 3-year window cycles)
• Avoid competing projects/products