Microsoft

Most of the people are smart, hardworking, and fun. They are very passionate about what they do.

I've always had pretty good work/life balance, with only occasional long weekends and late nights.

The products have global impact, which can be exciting.

There is very good pay, health coverage, and other benefits.

Sometimes there's a lot of bureaucracy, the normal sort you expect from a big company. Frequent re-orgs waste almost a month every year, or more.

Slow promotion process to get to a Lead or Manager position. In years there, I've only seen a few people leave lead positions, and only a couple people move into lead positions from the individual contributor ranks.

Review process is not fun. There's a lot of competition and it's a forced bell curve. I spend a large portion of my time working to distinguish myself and grab projects from others so that I could get into the top 30% bracket; otherwise, you might get randomly laid off if the company is going through a re-org. Sometimes a whole team might get low review scores, just because another team was deemed more important.

(Supposedly they dumped the review ratings, but they still rate you and use that to determine your bonus and promotions. And the bonus is still on a forced curve. Now they just don't tell you the score, but you can still figure it out based on the bonus percentage you get.)

Also, the SDE vs SDET thing is not the best; however, it should be improving. In the past, SDE could dump garbage over the fence, and SDET had to test, find bugs, help with fixes, and then get in trouble for slowing down the feature RI or shipping date. The company is trying to put more responsibility on the SDEs for code quality, and if they succeed, then great! But I'll believe it when I see it.

Nope.