Microsoft

Base pay and benefits are decent; coworkers are great!

Lots of good and varied opportunities if you find the right teams.

Satya promotes a good overall direction.

Work-life balance can be rough if you're a software engineer in certain orgs. Most engineers I met were forced into participating in on-call support rotations. When you're on-call, be prepared to skip most travel or any event where you can't reach a laptop to be online to respond within 10 minutes.

We were told by management that, in order to meet our requirements, we should avoid going to movies, sporting events, and areas where cell service wasn't consistent, or anywhere that we couldn't get internet service quickly. Be ready to skip workout classes, school events, long walks, or even scenarios where you may potentially get stuck in traffic.

These on-call shifts may last for a few hours a day up to an entire week at a time, depending on your team's rotation policy. There is no real compensation for work done during on-call shifts or for being on call. Your manager may give you some flexibility in your working hours to compensate.

Some upper managers are really into doublespeak and cognitive dissonance. When multiple teams were laid off to move headcount to sites in other countries (without reasoning given), the VP of the org bragged of record growth and profits while simultaneously telling everyone that they needed to tighten up and work harder because they were now inexplicably short-staffed.

Be realistic about work-life balance and look at staffing levels and on-call policies.