Microsoft

Lots of different areas to work. Lots of room to grow technically. Work-life balance. Inclusive culture. Good benefits, such as 401k match and family coverage for insurance.

Managers are too powerful; it shouldn't be this easy to hire or fire people.

Diverse teams but not much diversity in the team. There are only Chinese people in most research teams, I mean, all Chinese.

Pay is lower than most companies, especially on levels like 59, 60, 61, 62.

No free food. Food on campus is expensive and not tasty. Lots of Mexican food despite there being almost no Mexican engineers. No Russian food despite 20% of the company being Russian.

You are pushed to leave the company if you improve your skills because changing teams won't affect your level band and salary. Some teams don't have much budget, but some have a lot. I saw level 60 people who are much better than level 63 seniors but are not paid equally. This makes them unhappy because they are forced to go to higher-paying companies. Lots of people leave the company for this reason.

Too much bureaucracy between higher and lower band people, and they treat you with no respect.

Being a contractor here is much better than being a full-time employee. You don't have to deal with politics and can survive just by doing your job.

Review system is a joke.

Not enough accommodations for disabled people. Lots of benefit denials.

Not enough financial support for education. My manager offered me $x towards college tuition for a year, but actual tuition is more than $20x. It must be a joke.

Invest in your lower-band employees first. Managers and PMs don't do much; everything is done by your developers.

Get rid of useless PMs and pay your engineers more. Most PMs only celebrate things as if they created them. Their overall contribution to anything is less than 10% of the actual work done.

Rotate managers frequently so that they don't start their own empires. Some managers are like gods. They think that they can do anything they want.