Microsoft Reviews in Mountain View, CA

Pros

1. The intellectual energy of the employees- very smart people
2. Always a challenge
3. Great resources and tools to get the job done
4. Superb benefits
5. Bill Gates is next to God

Cons

Can be nasty if you get into the wrong group. Some groups practice tribal warfare
Too demanding of your time- can become your life
To many Type AAAA personalties
Can be a tad too serious

Advice to Senior Management

Need to shake off the old mentality of warring tribal groups and a winner. Too much energy and resources are being burnt.
Get people to work together.
Break up cutting edge units into semi-independent units and lavish them with R&D and $$ to market products quickly.

Pros

Access to the tools and resources needed
Flexible work schedule
Frequent assessment of employee morale
Freedom to book and manage individual travel
Corporate and social responsibility

Cons

The company has grown too large in scope and headcount
Bureaucracy has overtaken common sense
Isolation from the industry conversation in Silicon Valley

Advice to Senior Management

Relocate centers of influence, power, decision-making outside of Redmond
Stay genuinely connected to the conversation by being physically present
Invest in more customer (enterprise and consumer) face-time

Pros

great benefits, work environment, smart people to work with, latest technology, not a bad salary, work life balance, product discounts and many more

Cons

Better stay close to redmod if you need growth. There is nothing critical happening in SVC or other dev centers. some time employees are not well informed.

Advice to Senior Management

make sure you respect remote development. Run fast...don't sit on your ass for something magic to happen. Make the top management more dyanamic.

Pros

good benefit and good office

Cons

resource management, project management and life and work balance

Advice to Senior Management

too many PMs

Pros

Great benefits and great perks. Good competitive salary, lots of incentives to be an employee in terms of extras. This is more valid for people in Redmond.

Cons

Microsoft is a highly political place to work in terms of how you get ahead. It's more who you know and how you grease the wheels vs what you know and how hard you work.

Advice to Senior Management

Cut the dead weight employees that have been hanging on there for years and not doing any valid work. You keep these people in order to pad the bottom 10%.

Pros

Microsoft is the #1 software company of the world, hence you work on very popular products (usually)
The medical plan is the best in US.
Work life balance is good

Cons

It is a Redmond centric company. If you are outside of Redmond you are nothing.
Middle management sucks. No ideas, just process and politics

Advice to Senior Management

If Microsoft is your first work experience and you started working 5+ years ago, resign now! Go somewhere else and come back with a fresh point of view.

Pros

Free sodas and a reasonably smart group of people who are always willing to work with you and work late.

Cons

Be prepared for the bureaucracy. There will be times when requests must be vetted through what seems like dozens of teams before anything gets done.

Advice to Senior Management

Stock awards given to me were about as worthless as the underwater stock options they replaced. Need more financial incentives.

Pros

Pay is good. Benefits are fantastic. They are very systematic in terms of performance reviews. There are some good people and they have lots of opportunities for training and networking within the company. Relatively secure -- going to be around for a while.

Cons

Generally not a very dynamic place, compared to other high tech companies. Big on process and complex (and deep) org charts. They like to lock in development cycles for at least a year at a time. Interesting decisions seem to be made based on complex internal politics among the many, many high-level managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at how other companies are achieving greater agility -- it's not with heavy processes and lots of Program Managers.

Pros

Microsoft as a whole is very good. Excellent benefits, big company job, lots of resources for training and such. One of the best health benefits I have come across.

Cons

If you are going to Tellme Division of Microsoft, I would recommend avoiding like a plague if you dont belong to the origin of the country where walmart outsources most of its merchandise.

Advice to Senior Management

Diversity and promotion to multiple ethnicity in Tellme QA dept. Even HR acts as nothing is happening.

Pros

Microsoft is extremely professional and mature when it comes to software development. If you want to know how to really make software, this is where you want to work. Also, if you plan to have any kind of health issues, ever, you want to work here as well. The health benefits are gold plated. And the chances for advancement are good (up to senior level).

Cons

If you are not on the software development track you might not have the most fun in the world. Testers often try to move over to software development. And PMs seem to change quite frequently. So some jobs are better than others there. Also, once you reach the senior level it is very, very hard to move up to the next level (architect). Some groups don't even have an architect assigned to them, so you may never rise above senior level (I certainly couldn't). Finally, the cafeteria food is not that great.

Advice to Senior Management

After having tried living in a Java world, I just don't see how people can live with all the random open source stuff that literally does not work. When you develop in a Microsoft environment it all works. There is simply no comparison. But somehow you guys lost out the mindshare to every single developer I've ever met outside of Microsoft. Your development environment can cost $10,000! Haven't you figured out by now that people want their dev tools to be free. And people will put up with non-functioning crap in order to get that price of free. You guys seriously need to drop the cost of the Visual Studio environment and get people to see how easy it is to work with.