Microsoft

Management recognizes hard work and/or talent.

The culture is good; employees are majority upbeat.

The workspace is modern and beautiful.

Work-life balance is encouraged.

For being a top 4 tech company, pay is significantly lower than its 4 closest competitors. Team dependent, but management has a tendency to ignore large technical problems or underestimate project complexity, leading to false starts and resets where we have to dig out of the hole we find ourselves in. Commonly, a virtual team prototypes with no domain knowledge, ships it, gets rewards, and hands off maintenance to the experts to fix. The maintaining team is expected to pull miracle fixes but isn't rewarded proportionally to the challenge. Horizontal hops are disproportionately rewarded versus consistent top contributors.

Be careful to avoid incentive structures that incentivize taking shortcuts to ship quickly. My observation has been we end up paying the cost in triplicate later down the line. This debt compounds into missed opportunities, poor user experience, and loss of talent.

Consider offering other work locations. The coasts are terribly expensive and offer much lower quality of life that many talented ICs want, despite the extra pay.