Microsoft

The company is politically very mature, in terms of all details in policies, activities, learning resources, and caring for people.

The company cares for people very much. It strongly supports work/life balance, advocates for 20% of office hours to be used for learning courses, and provides top-level resources such as gyms, shuttles, snacks, and a campus environment.

The company is very famous, and its people are respected and admired by outsiders.

The company has a unique position called "Program Manager," which other companies do not have. It's a lowest-level position, the same as SDE, but it strongly develops people's soft skills, including inter-personal skills, thinking bigger, managing teamwork, and improving the product life cycle. It is a really great position to gain growth rapidly.

A myth here is that PM, Dev, and Test are the "3 pillars." In fact, PMs are the most important. They are half the leadership team and also under the most workload. Devs are the most cost-effective, with the least workload and mild-paced promotion. Tests are the most tedious, with the most workload, and least participated in strategic discussions.

Being in such a monster company, no one has high efficiency. Sometimes more than 50% of time is spent handling "ugly labor" cases such as upgrades, side-by-side deployments, security, and backward compatibility. Many bugs in a 10+ year C/C++ codebase need to be fixed before being able to write in C#. Huge external dependencies on other time-zoned areas (typically Redmond) are painful. You have to mail them a question and get a reply the next day, then you modify your question the day after. Typical global-scoped work is as slow as crazy.

But the worst thing is the shabby manager level. As a 3-4 year old campus, most managers and leads are less than 3 years at Microsoft. Most of them are Chinese industry hires from companies not comparable to Microsoft. Thus, they share a common serious problem: lack of leading abilities and real insights. A bunch of mediocre leaders are ruining the great dreams of excellent 1-from-1000 engineers.

There's an old saying: "A bad soldier is only one bad; a bad general is the whole army bad." If you keep hiring poor leaders and managers, like today, there's no hope for you to look upon.