Microsoft

The people are extremely smart, motivated, and fun to work with.

The company is not truly invested in growing employees to be what they want. Rather, they want to grow us to be more efficient where we currently are. For example, there is a long, dry gulch between the SDET and SDE roles. Even though some people have made the transition successfully, there is active discouragement by test leadership when attempting to make this transition.

The company is lost trying to make money and has become scared to do anything innovative.

The coolest products are handcuffed to profitability expectations before the idea is even baked, causing the best ideas to never bubble to the top.

Since there is such a high technical bar, incompetence moves into leadership to survive, which leads to the laziest workers in the middle.

The review process is a joke. Can you say bell curve?

Ballmer is running the company into the ground. The .com bubble was recovered from, but the MS stock never rebounded, and I hold him responsible.