Microsoft

The company really cares about its employees. They offer great benefits, perks, and a great campus. The work-life balance is really good too. You get to work on products millions use, and if you love MS technologies... well, you are using/creating them.

If you are not a real fan of Microsoft technologies, consider yourself tied up; you won't work on anything else other than MS-specific technologies/environments. This makes sense from the "protect your own brand" point of view, but I found it really annoying to be closed off to great technologies you have access to in all other companies. (Let's say, to use Ruby/Python for a side team stats project, you will probably be looked at like a weird being.) That for sure makes you fall behind other engineers in the market, limiting your scope of development.

The so-known calibration at the yearly performance review creates a working environment of "I won't help you because I don't want you to be above me," and I really felt that. I was even criticized for helping other teams in my organization because I should have given total priority to my team (it's not that I was not doing anything for my team, but I was the one that could help the other teams, and that also benefited us).

Don't tell your employee, "If I ask you to build a phone, it doesn't need to be the best phone, it can be an OK phone." That's what my manager told me, and it pretty much sums up what MS does: "Do things that are OK."

I'm sorry, MS. I want to do the best phone. (The phone thing was an analogy; I wasn't even in the Phone division).