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.

Pros

You will work with many bright people
Challenging business and technology problems
Executive leadership's focus and determination
Opportunities across the company
Great benefits

Cons

A big layer of incompetent middle managers especially in Director and Senior Director levels. Most of these folks came from "old" Microsoft. These would be Windows and Office orgs which function as the DMV. These middle managers are completely clueless in an intensely competitive online business . They are past a point where they can learn and grow. Most often, there is no interest in learning or understanding the nitty gritty details. These people operate with their acquired political acumen and want to "wing it" while making decisions without doing any necessary homework. For many of them, "extra-curricular" activities are priorities than real work. In a business where Microsoft is struggling, this middle management fat needs to be mercilessly sliced away if the company wants to improve its market share and perception.

Advice to Senior Management

Eliminate the incompetency or else the talent that you spend a lot of money to acquire and develop would leave. The state of the economy should not lull you into a sense of stupor. Improve your performance review processes especially at the Director and Senior Director levels. "Old Microsoft" connections and political alliances should not be a substitute for leadership and aptitude. The online business requires fast learners and strong leaders. "Poets" and "Office sales-persons" don't have the chops to come up to speed with the business models, econometrics and technologies that shape the online world.

Pros

Great place to gain diverse experience with latest technologies and tools, as well as to pursue new techniques and approaches

Cons

After the layoffs, some employees seem demoralized and not as vested in doing the job as they were before the layoffs.

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management should involve lower management more in any personnel decisions, especially those involving layoffs and any other negative moves.

Pros

Work with incredibly smart people, access to advanced technologies and know-how. Ability to create products and features used by literally billions of people worldwide, the ability to have large impact.

Cons

Lack of innovative culture, too many middle-aged people whose primary concerns are their family as opposed to creating the next killer app. No longer has the "we will change the world" mentality, has become a company whose primary purpose is to serve shareholders.

Advice to Senior Management

Promote innovation, be more agile, and put innovation and employees before shareholders. Nobody wants to work at a technology company in order to "fulfill their duties to their shareholders". People would rather go work at a place where the primary objective is to change the world.

Pros

flexable work time and great training. working with very smart people who are very good at what they do. good pay

Cons

bad management
too much overhead
process over result
perfomance review does not really measure performance. In fact, I have no idea what does it measure.

Advice to Senior Management

less overhead. focus more on result and less on process. get ride of the performance review, which is giant waste of time

Pros

The benefits are the best thing about MSFT. Terrible place for women and minorities

Cons

It really is all about who you know not what you know

Advice to Senior Management

PAy better atttention to performance mgmt system

Pros

Smart people, good opportunities, get to work on interesting projects, great campus, great benefits, ability to move around the world if you so choose

Cons

Work-life balance can be challenging, but mostly because you yourself need to proactively manage how many hours you work.... If you work 20 hours per day, there will still be work to do, so you have to make the choice where to draw the line.

Advice to Senior Management

More focus on what's important, more agility in bringing products to market, more clarity what the uber-strategy is for the company.