Microsoft

Microsoft offers some really good perks. The base salary is good, and the ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan) is well-designed. The health benefits were very good in the past, but they are not as good as they used to be.

You get to work on some really challenging projects. You have to keep learning and updating yourself at your job. This is not something that you do in your off time; you have to learn new technologies to perform your day-to-day work.

Some of the people here are very talented. They are scary intelligent, and you have a hard time gauging their potential. A wide range of employees are average, but average for Microsoft may be extraordinary for some other companies.

The work-life balance is very off. We have frequent releases, and every release brings long hours at the office.

Sometimes, we don't have enough time to fix a problem at its core. We are racing against time and have to provide a workable solution to the problem as soon as possible.

There are very few team morale events.

Give employees freedom to work on their own projects (like Google does).

Some of the decisions taken by higher management seem random at best and disastrous at worst.