Microsoft

I joined as an L59 and left as an L61.

Big pros are:

• (If you're lucky) having a good manager who can guide you up the career ladder and broaden your horizons.
• Smart people. You can learn every day, if you want to learn.
• Good compensation and benefits (until idiots who dialed 911 for a simple scratch forced Microsoft into introducing co-payments for benefits).

• Idiot managers. There are still lots of living fossils who are in management positions just because they've been there for 10+ years.

My last manager was still trying to write a PowerPoint presentation from time to time, organize weekly meetings, and (most irritating) reminding me to mark my time off whenever I was out.

I asked her what to do when I debugged stuff until midnight, and she didn't know what to tell me.

Microsoft could fire half of its managers, and there would not be a difference in the engineering process or deliverables.

• "Russian roulette." People mention online that you really don't know when you will be fired. Yes, you don't know when, because they fire in such a way that a pattern cannot be established.

• The "curve." Not sure if it's still there, but having to find 5% of people to fire based on performance was a bit bad, given the strive to only hire the best. The result was dumber new hires than the people fired.

• After 6 years in the company, new hires were offered more than I had, at the same level.

Get rid of the intermediate managers.

Enforce a "lead by example" mentality, not lead by how much time someone has been rotting in the office.

Also, eliminate bureaucracy. There should be none in an IT company.