Microsoft

I was at Microsoft for 4 years in various roles/divisions.

• World-class engineers
• Great pay/benefits
• Very interesting problems to solve
• Mega-scale challenges and opportunities
• Satya's changes to make Microsoft focused on being a cloud and services company and starting to embrace open source is the right future.

Unfortunately, I think the cons still outweigh the pros at Microsoft.

• Company culture is in general terrible due to politics, personal career aspirations, and brilliant jerks.
• Politics. I can't stress this con enough. People are more concerned about their own career advancement than their team and our customers.
• Brilliant jerks are still promoted and given a lot of influence.
• Work/life balance can be terrible depending on the org.
• Proprietary APIs and custom implementations in Azure provide the same functionality as open-source projects.
• The higher up you move in levels/leadership at Microsoft, the more political it gets.
• Reorgs are still frequent, incredibly disruptive, and cause a constant exodus of talent.

• Make healthy company culture a strategic focus; otherwise, the future is handicapped.

• Take a hard look at how Google and Facebook approach internal politics and learn from them. Remove the ability for individuals to build empires and put their individual careers ahead of company culture or customers.

• Instead of focusing on trying to keep our talent from leaving for competitors, focus on making our talent so happy they attract talent from competitors. Learn from Salesforce's Open Opportunity Market.