Pros

People are very bright and helpful, it has a very good team environment. The pay is good, not much to complain about.

Cons

Cant really think of any complaints about MS, I guess it's next to impossible to get to the top considering how many people work there.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up hte good owrk

Pros

Amazing managers who really understood that their primary role within a company is not to make themselves look better, but to grow you as a person and as a worker. I had nothing but great experiences working at MS, and still feel a bit of regret in leaving.

Cons

It was difficult to reconcile my personal life and work with regards to transferring locations. Once you're in a location, you're pretty much set. It's not a huge drawback, but it was ultimately the reason I left.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus more on quality of all products, and do a better job at influencing hardware development with your partners. Microsoft does not make much hardware, but when they do it's actually pretty good (Xbox360 red-ring aside). But the biggest problem is not in the software, but the fact that it has to run on such a multitude of hardware that MS does not make. If instead they influenced the hardware makers, or even made more products of their own, MS would have more of a chance to focus on quality.

Oh, and do something about those stock prices. I'm still a shareholder.

Pros

The environment is rich in resoures. Benefits are good. Health insurance is outstanding. Very diverse work environment. Good cafeterias, cheap food.

Cons

The work environment is flooded with cheap overseas labor. Salaries are low. Review structure is completely opaque. Promotion paths are opaque. Employees are at the whim of thier managers. Microsoft Managers are the best double talkers in the world. They receive special training.

Advice to Senior Management

Quit taking initiatives. Managers and employees at all levels are required to initiate just about anything. At each level, employee initiatives are driven by their managers initiatives. They are so desperate to take on an initiative that will let them stand out, that managers often take on tasks that make no sense and pass them on to subordinates.

Pros

Fantastic place for an engineer.
Best place to take your analytical and design skills to their utmost.
Good benefits package.

Cons

Salaries are bad. Real bad. Microsoft makes you pay them for working there. Microsoft DOES NOT PAY.
Even if you are in sales, you are not getting what your peers are getting at other places. You work at Microsoft because you would enjoy the work, definitely even though it's life suckingly hard, not for the salary, not at all.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus. Start shutting down certain products. Microsoft does not have to develop everything that everyone will ever use. Focus.

Pros

excellent medical insurance, all your family gets covered without penny out of your pocket. majority employee gets his own office.

Cons

too many directions, and lots of unnecessary competition among different divisions within the company. it might've been better off if microsoft were split into three during the antitrust suit.

Advice to Senior Management

think from customer's point of view, not from microsoft's or window's point view. make product easy to use, not piles of features that no one knows how to use.

Pros

cafeteria with subsidized food, beautiful campus in a beautiful city, opportunities to broaden knowledge

Cons

work you to death. no real work life balance.

Advice to Senior Management

look to balance employees work and life. recognize that we are people and are more than simply our job title

Pros

- Great health and other benefits. Everything is covered.
- large place, so you can work on many interesting teams, roles and projects across the company
- nice facilities

Cons

- political top brass
- compensation is so-so. pay freeze in 2009

Advice to Senior Management

pay more to retain top talent. reduce politics at the top

Pros

Great people, benefits, work/life balance (if one takes cares of it), unlimited resources either money or headcount), global footprint, installed base of legacy systems (OS and Office)

Cons

lack of accountability for leadership, complex structure makes hard to manage, cross-group collab or achieve results. slow moving. All decisions made by CEO slows down innovation path

Advice to Senior Management

Renew leadership, focus on less few important things and stop the childish attitude of anything non Microsoft being evil (iPhone, Macs, Google, Adobe, etc).

Pros

1) Good benefits
2) Very brilliant people, mostly in the low part of the ladder.
3) Opportunity to move around to other team. (Can be better)

Cons

Many of the SDET leads lack technical knowledge, and they are more fans of political fights to protect their jobs. Based on some feedback from SDET friends that their leads more tend to use job security to intimate the poor sdets. As a SDE, I feel much better being respected by my lead and previous leads. So
1) If you are a good developer, don't go for SDET positions, unless really need a job.
2) If you hope to apply for green card, stay away from Microsoft, as they laid off people and cannot begin the process in 1 or more years.
3) If you want to keep yourself marketable, don't come. You'll be lost in all weird windows technologies which is hard to adjust to and will drain your energy in the slowness.
4) If you believe you are good at playing people game, Microsoft is heaven for you.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't fire low level people, instead targeting at senior SDET leads or test managers.

Pros

Very good working environment, supportive managers, very flexible working hours. get real shipped project done. best benefit package in the industry.

Cons

They have too many people. While most of them are very smart and hard-working people some are not. Software development circle is a bit long.

Advice to Senior Management

trim the work force. encourage innovation and stop investing too much money on Bing. Let computer science major people be PMs.