Pros

Good pay and benefits; good work/life balance on my team, but it depends what team you're on. It still looks good on a resume.

Cons

Juggernaut career climbers who destroy a group to make themselves look good. A company who's only strategy is to draft behind innovators and maintain profits for the big shareholders. Impossible to get anything done without getting buyoff from tons of people. Employees are incredibly unaware of what's going on in the rest of the industry. Strong sense of entitlement.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop buying other people's innovations and start really putting your own blood into the game. That's the only way this company is going to learn how to own what it sells, care about the customer, and really be accountable instead of just talking the talk.

Pros

-- One of the few companies who can actually deliver on a 'promise' of opportunities to move around within the broader organization, based on interests, skills, availability, etc.
-- Brand name recognition
-- The opportunity to be involved in products and initiatives seen and used around the world.
-- Working with smart, dedicated people
-- The benefits are, hands-down, the best of any company I've worked for in a 20-year career (as in, no deductible after the initial annual one, pick up your prescription and don't pay a *cent*, chiropractic and therapy sessions all covered, etc., though dental is capped at a relatively low rate)
-- Great for hard-charging people who are adept at managing politics, meeting high (often un-stated) expectations, patient in the need to regularly revisit past decisions, thrive in changing environments and who can prioritize on a dime with little information

Cons

-- Typically, people are brought in to hold responsibilities they had at least one or two jobs ago (as if being a stellar performer elsewhere requires sliding backward when at Microsoft)
-- Resistant, at least in marketing where Microsoft's marketing prowess needs to be updated, to new ideas if nothing appears definitively "broken" about the current way
-- Unless you're in a position deemed as officially "creative", there is little room for bringing creativity to bear
-- Really, really bad people managers are the norm; good managers are extremely hard to find and they (at least in Marketing) are expected to achieve an almost-impossible, and certainly exhausting and unsustainable, level of their own "individual" work in addition to managing a team. This, despite some wide-ranging and high-potential programs put in place as required.
-- Rewards seem out of whack. Really, really, really, really bad people-managers stay employed, get inexplicably promoted if they appear to improve over a few months or get transferred to another group (where they can wreak havoc on someone else's watch). I know of at least three instances of this, where each had numerous complaints to HR, poor marks from direct reports during annual surveys, high rates of team turnover, general unhappiness, etc.
-- Incentives are often misaligned with other teams (or not even considered in line with those teams).
-- The most difficult promotion to achieve (other than to President/CEO, of course) is from senior manager to director. It essentially requires a calculated, two-year campaign of project assignments, awareness-building to potential 'voters' of your personality and accomplishments, the stars to align under a blue moon and not a single detractor among the voters. Can be done, certainly, but it's a brutal, unpredictable, ruthless process.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize that your actions speak louder than words with employees (particularly when you reward bad behavior and/or don't require managers to cultivate the best from their employees, who likely all have different types of intelligence, communication style and ways of operating).
Recognize that your bad apples become rotten and the rot spreads. Though they may appear to have been integral to a product's or project's success, others will actually step up to fill the void you're fearful of creating by actually finding someone who can lead *and* build a positive work environment.
Align goals across organizations that work together.
Recognize that making everyone fit a certain 'type' doesn't equal success ultimately.
Stop over-analyzing things before trying them, and you might just truly innovate again.

Pros

The health benefits are great for families. There are amazing and smart people, some good managers, some good senior managers.

Cons

This is not a family friendly workplace - the surveys are incorrect in their assessments. it's not an easy place for woman with young families. The expectations can be too great.

Advice to Senior Management

If you wish to retain more women at all levels, investigate how to increase work life balance. Better educate middle managers of HR benefits.

Pros

Systems level work done is very good. Liked working on them. That is perhaps only reason why i woudl consider moving back if i ever do.

Cons

Too big. Kind of skills needed for success here are people skills rather than technical skills. Also there is no job security.

Advice to Senior Management

Put Ballmer back into sales and make someone who understands technology and is passionate about it as CEO.

Pros

Microsoft is challenging. You will be stretched. You will never be bored.
Microsoft offers good pay and excellent benefits.
Microsoft belives in training staff, and you will be able to learn new things and develop.
Microsoft is huge, so there are always a lot of jobs. If you are the kind of person who likes to transfer internally (after you are in your position a year, that is) then you will find ample opportunity.
Microsoft offers an internal mentoring program, which all new employees should take advantage of.
Microsoft supports parents, allowing time off.
Microsoft is about getting your job done, not about face time in the office. If you want to work 10am - 7pm, fine, as long as you deliver. They also have excellent IT which enable you to work from home. There are a lot of people who work remotely or variations of part-time.
Microsoft isn't always an easy place to work, but others will help you. Just ask.
Microsoft dogfoods it's tech on employees so things in tech don't always work perfectly. However, you do have cutting edge stuff, which is really cool.

Cons

Getting into Microsoft can be hard. Make sure you are thoroughly prepared and have done a lot of research.
Sadly, the parts of Microsoft I saw have a lot of politics. Tread carefully, and ask others more experienced than you for advice.
Teams or groups tend to work on overlapping tasks, therefore you have to fight for your patch and, sometimes, it isn't about getting the job done right, it's about getting it done first, and publicizing that fact.
Because teams are graded on a curve - 10% lowest performaners, 70% in the middle and 20% high performers, you are effectively competing against your own team throughout the year. Make sure all the managers in your group - not just your own - know about your achievements.
Reorganizations and restructuring are the order of the day at Microsoft. Learn to go with the flow as the change happens and create a new niche for yourself when the dust settles.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should stop constant reorganizations. They are destablizing, costly and negatively impact customer experience (both internal and external customers). Even a radical move, like freezing all reorgs for two years, would be a good idea. People need to win the battle, not constantly rearrange troop formations.
Management need to take a hard look at their marketing and advertising strategy. Uncool advertising is so embarrassing for employees, who'd really like to be proud to work there.

Pros

Great benefits with lot of talented and technical people from all over the world. Very diversified.

Cons

Management seems to be full of managers and leads at all functional levels either technical or non-technical.

Advice to Senior Management

Managers need to be better trained to guide and advise the staff.

Pros

Super medical benefits
Chance to move to different group after a couple of years. If you work in Redmond this benefit is very very attractive.
Lot of smart people
You will get your own private office room (you need to wait 1-3 years sometimes). I was lucky to my own office after 6 months and having that privacy was great for focus.

Cons

Bad manager can ruin you. In my case, my manager in the second group was over-demanding and it made life difficult.
Bureaucracy can be a damper, depending on your group.

Advice to Senior Management

Move fast and be bold like Google. Come up with inspired products like Apple.

Pros

It is Microsoft so if the game you work on tanks you will more than likely just move to another team.

Good benefits.

A few good people remain.

Cons

Having worked there as long as I did seeing the transformation of the company change from "we'll take on the world" to "the world must come to us" is the indicator of a company on the decline.

Management is more concerned about their next move up the food chain and their P&L than your career or life.

They hire people for their name rather than their competency.

There is very little transparency regarding upper management decisions and strategy.

They closed down a profitable game studio, mostly because it wasn't an Xbox title.

Advice to Senior Management

Get your shi*t together.

Fire Ballmer, even Wall Street doesn't buy his bullsh*t.

Pros

good opportunity to learn how operating system works, how to write test cases, how to communicate with each other efficiently.

Cons

Microsoft as a big company gives each employee a small fixed work to do. So it is hard to learn much with single title.

Advice to Senior Management

Managers are very nice and they respect people. Usually they will listen to different ideas and then find out a optimal way to work.

Pros

Excellent benefits
Higher than average compensation
Opportunities for professional growth
Some teams work on cool technologies
Relatively stable company

Cons

Your career limits are based on who you impress with your performance. You have to do the things that management cares about even when they're bad for the company
Your credibility is determined more based on who you know rather than what you've accomplished
Long work hours are expected
Seattle weather sucks

Advice to Senior Management

Success depends on execution not just strategy. Top management needs to be more involved in execution.
Being overly centralized in Redmond (with 40,000 employees in the area) creates a distorted reality. Listen to employees from all over the world and take their input seriously.