Microsoft

Industry-leading compensation and benefits, good culture, very comfortable workplace environment.

They will do whatever it takes to enable you to do your job. Other tech companies can make it a nightmare to get the basic things you need to do your job, but here they go out of their way to ensure you have what you need and are comfortable.

Honestly, the office is so high-end, and all my stuff is so nice; I don't even want to go back to my crappy apartment at the end of the day.

The work-life balance has been really great so far. I previously worked at a company that everyone claims is the best for work-life balance, and it wasn't.

Lots of people say it is bad at MSFT, but I haven't experienced having to work evenings and weekends yet, as I'm still new (< 1 yr).

So far, my manager is fantastic—really invested in my success. I'm hoping it stays that way.

I've heard horror stories from ex-employees, and one does not need to go far to find them on the internet. None of that has been my experience so far. There are over a hundred thousand people working here, so I don't doubt some teams/organizations could be more miserable. I also work at a satellite office where it is more laid-back than on the main campuses.

The downsides I have experienced are it's easy to get out of the loop/disconnected from other engineers on teams that aren't directly associated with your own team but are teams that you need to work closely with to get your job done efficiently. In other words, it's a big company, and it's hard to organize multiple large teams spanning multiple time zones.

I also am working on a relatively small piece of the puzzle. It seems many people run the risk of being siloed. They move people around periodically to prevent stagnation. This isn't really an issue to me because I will do whatever it takes to remain employed, so the idea that one should have to always be engaged in the most important tasks, etc., has always kind of felt like a giant sentiment of entitlement that most of my millennial cohort adopt, so this is not really a con to me.

And who knows, they could fire me next month and revoke my starting bonus, and I might be singing a different tune.

It seems like the cultural changes that Satya has driven have really paid off compared to the Ballmer era. Keep it up.