Microsoft

Good rewards if career-driven and good at communicating visibility. Flexible time, especially if you can deliver output with quality on schedule. A good middle manager can make the experience good and shield you from political randomization.

Overemphasis on communication and politics can lead to burnout if one is poor at estimating or committing. Even though abolished in name, 6-month reviews in 2017 still used old stack ranking across peers and sister teams at your band level.

Internal engineering infrastructure is clunky and subpar compared to industry open source. There is too much use of slow and buggy internal proprietary tooling. The tech stack is heavily Microsoft-built proprietary, half-baked, and buggy. There is zero or horrible documentation and too much reliance on email distribution list support for any layer of the stack.

Your experience is a function of the ability of your manager and the team culture. Top contributors can get slighted by average or subpar developers during review time based on politics.

Get HR to truly abolish stack ranking and embrace industry standards and tech stacks internally. Instead, bolting those on gives the appearance that Microsoft supports open-source platforms. This creates a negative and fierce environment with peers, which is not the case.