Microsoft

• Competitive base pay.
• Good bonus and stock for higher levels (Senior band and above).
• Excellent benefits – probably close to the best around.
• Product organizations are highly respected and easy to move around.
• Product organizations are interested in your career and will help you succeed, treating failure as a learning experience (just don't keep failing).
• Work-life balance is pretty good most of the time (there are some exceptions).

• Bonus is OK for lower-level bands, but stock is minimal. • The IT organization (MSIT) has a bad reputation within Product organizations (if you go into IT, it's hard to get out). • The IT org is much too political. If you show poor performance during a review, they'd rather get rid of you instead of helping you succeed. • IT org engineering groups rely too much on offshore vendors and are vendor-heavy. • IT org engineering FTE employees don't get to code as much as Product groups, so your skills will atrophy if you don't do something else to supplement. • The culture is deteriorating because Microsoft is just too big.

I've spent most of my career in Product organizations (Exchange, Office, Windows, Azure) and never had an issue until I joined an IT engineering org. My experience is not isolated; it is common. I will either be leaving IT and going back to a Product group, or I'll be leaving Microsoft. The IT org needs to be fixed.