Microsoft

Good for your CV. You learn how to deal with software complexity and company complexity. Decent benefits and stocks. You can work from home.

Work-life balance is okay, but still not aligned with the Danish IT market.

The salary is a bit below the standard Danish IT market, but expectations are above.

Many people are "informally" required to be on 24/7 from time to time (including Christmas holidays, Easter, etc.), with low extra pay.

There is a lot of legacy code, and a lot of code is bought from external companies, or it is outsourced and then integrated into the products, which makes the codebase very hard to read and poorly written.

All the work going on is always secondary, where the main things are happening in the US or in other countries. This also means that Microsoft Copenhagen may not survive for a long time.

The engineering work is pretty much bug fixing and some small enhancements. There is little space for innovation, and innovating requires diving into the huge bureaucracy.

Software and people management are complex, so everything moves very slowly.

The company enforces a 6-month review where employees are evaluated by managers and colleagues. This is well known to generate a toxic, competitive environment with a lot of hypocritical people.

Too many management changes.

High turnover rate, because of many people quitting and many firings.

The company mood, work-life balance, and benefits are gradually dropping.

People are not that smart. There are excellent people, but the average level is not that impressive.

People are maintenance-oriented instead of being engineering-oriented.

Improve manager quality and code quality. Care more about your customers, as even if they don't complain enough about the low software quality, they will eventually change products.

Attract more work in Copenhagen instead of behaving like a maintenance company. Instead, focus more on innovation.