Microsoft

Excellent benefits, low-stress. Great people, managers are typically good at managing teams. Depending on the manager, you can get good recognition if you go out of the way to contribute more than what is expected (and what is expected is actually very basic).

If you're looking for something exciting and cutting-edge, Microsoft is probably not the place. It's a big company with a defined hierarchy, and it can be hard to feel like you're making an innovative contribution. Management, for the most part, is looking for and expecting code monkeys.

You have some great people working for you, but you're under-utilizing them – by a lot. Give people explicit incentives to innovate and come up with clever feature/product ideas, and you'll be surprised with the strong response. My experience is that I have about 3 hours' worth of work per 8-hour day, so I have a lot of spare time. Most developers I spoke to have the same workload, and providing an incentive to use that time for innovation would yield results without cutting into existing work.

I also get the sense that if you just stay in your group long enough, you'll get promoted to Senior. I think you can raise the bar for promotions some more. I've seen Seniors who have been with Microsoft for 10 years, taking home probably $150k, who do not have a single patent to their name. In other words, they're being paid $150k a year to write and debug code – something an above-average high school senior could do. There's no reason why they should have ever been promoted past the SDE II stage. Tie promotions to innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, and you'll notice a big positive change in the company's performance.

Microsoft's big problem is not that we don't have great people; it's just that those great people are not being incentivized to innovate, and that explains why even with all that talent, we're constantly 3-4 years behind our competitors.