Microsoft

Great work-life balance (nearly everyone is out of the office by 5). Microsoft pays its workers extremely well to make up for its work environment. Easy work, lots of benefits, free soft drinks. Family-friendly tech company.

Very hard to change teams, excessive internal politics. Managers intentionally assign you less challenging work to allow their favorites excel at your expense. Anti-intellectual "brogrammer" culture. Extreme hostility to open source. Weird looks for not owning a Windows phone. Culture of groupthink where you can't challenge decisions made in meetings. Sink-or-swim review system pits you against your immediate coworkers and encourages cut-throat competitive behavior. Senior developers use code reviews to gang up on and haze newbies with "moving target" coding style comments. Dying company that serially releases market failures. PPO healthcare was cut by Ballmer/Brummel. Food is not free, and cafeterias do not accept credit cards. Coworkers are incompetent developers with big mouths who are good at playing politics.

Carry out a much-needed cultural cleansing by eliminating all of the dead weight in the company. Avoid blaming and firing the wrong execs, followed by promoting the people that should have gotten fired instead to the executive level. Extend the reach of the review system such that employees are ranked company-wide rather than only against their immediate "team"-mates.