Pros: Good work-life balance, stress-free environment, flexible hours, and talented business-side and innovative people.

Cons: Employee expectations will be managed so they don't expect much with bonuses and raises. They keep blaming the market, quarterly earnings, or some random things as excuses not to give you a proper bonus. Depending on the team, senior executives who are close to upper management try to get the maximum share of the bonus allocation, but that trend is changing recently. Senior management is afraid of setting a vision toward cutting-edge technology; they always like to play in their comfort zone. Managers have different working styles, and if you don't fit into their mold, you're gone. They don't help; instead, you get to take the brunt of their useless attitude.

Pros: Super smart people, good work/life balance.

Cons: It can be cut-throat. Low performers are cut every year, which can affect morale.

Pros: Great people-centric work culture. Very professional and structured corporate environment. Mostly merit-driven, but career progression may be slow. Great place to learn finance and accounting, and to work with global teams. One will build deep domain expertise if one stays long, which will result in a competitive advantage in financial services technology. Globalised exposure to markets, financial norms, and processes. Decent (not exciting or top tier) compensation compared to IT services firms.

Cons: MS, about 15-20 years back, was a leading technology firm on Wall Street (though it is a financial services org), pioneering cutting-edge technology infrastructure, tooling, and processes. But since then, it has missed the technology evolution and innovation bus. Many of its systems and platforms are legacy, over 15 years old, and innovation is very slow. Risk-taking in technology is discouraged, and it is generally very difficult to bring in new technology stacks or experiment with new technology. Senior technology leadership is more focused on functional domain knowledge and people/client/user perception management over technology innovation, risk-taking, and leapfrogging. There is a strong element of HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion counts) culture too; if you don't agree with your manager or super manager, it can lead to your career stalling. So, it encourages conformance, and disagreements are rarely taken lightly. At one time, it used to be in the top 10 percentile of compensation for technology-based roles, priding itself as the best engineering shop on Wall Street. But since the last decade of the software boom and after the 2008 financial crisis, it is not even in the top 25 percentile. Compensation is no longer exciting, and growth is slow compared to new-age startups and product technology firms such as FAANG. Even now, cloud computing is a novelty and buzzword at MS, and there is no definite roadmap for implementation. Teams in non-US locations are generally disempowered and not part of key ownership or decision-making processes. The center of power continues to be NY, and unless the users are in your location, you will be treated as second-class corporate citizens. FOMO and disempowerment drive Indian technologists to accommodate calls at unreasonable times and be deferential to less competent colleagues abroad. Due to the global nature of work, expect calls at odd times of the day or late evenings to cover or work with colleagues in other time zones.