Microsoft

A company past its creativity curve. Only a tiny portion of the projects are interesting, and people will fight for you. If you newly join the company, you will spend quite some time doing outdated technologies.

"Factory", "assembly line" style process: this company is smart enough to "streamline-lize" its software development into something similar to Ford's assembly line. Working in that procedure gives you a strong feeling that you are one replaceable piece on it.

Management tries to get "most mileage" out of you: the management will try to make you work hard, overtime (while not explicitly saying so to leave "evidence"). One time I saw the manager explicitly wrote "do more with less", meaning getting more done with less people, in his commitment. Another time I heard the management using "get enough mileage out of people". They would make aggressive planning, use progress tracking software, and status report meetings to force you into working overtime. Not only that, during work, it's highly intense. I had to make sure the previous scheduled tasks made progress and timely respond to the boss's emails of ad-hoc tasks. Sometimes I needed to switch between 5 desktop servers to run different tasks to get my assignments done. Looking back, every year made me age 3-4 years.

Selfish culture. It boosted a culture that everybody tries to strive to get what's within his own boundary done. And the company values the winner from internal competition (as the company is so big, upper management doesn't have time to judge who's right, so the simplest way I guess, is to see who has won out). From a lower level, that means peers just don't collaborate but undermine each other. From bigger teams' perspective, it's the fight between partners, and it results in endless re-orgs.

Information control. Mid-management gives exactly the information that you need to work on your piece of work. You don't know about the next reorg, and you don't know the direction of the project.

"Precision Question Answering". There's this poisonous "communication tool" within Microsoft called "Precision Question Answering". It essentially trains people into using robotic-style conversations, so that management can get the important information in the fastest way, and peers can challenge each other to fix logic errors in the details, at the cost of enjoying human-like collaboration between colleagues.

Compensation is terribly below the industry average level.