Pros

- Very smart people
- Good salary, benefits, etc
- The results of your work go practically everywhere (ok, it depends on the group you're in).
- Job security, despite the recent rounds of layoffs.
- Better work/life balance than let's say 10 years ago.

Cons

- Company lost its edge, missed several trains to competition, and what is frustrating to employees is that lots of ideas had been Microsoft's in the first place, but they had been botched during execution.
- Lack of clear accountability.
- Politics there is not for the faint of heart.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on delivering good experiences rather than half backed "features"

Pros

Interesting and diverse cutting edge legal work, very collegial, smart clients, decent hours, stock options, beautiful campus and scenery, great local community.

Cons

Organization is pretty large and growing, and makes it harder to know everyone as well as in the past. Increasing competition from others also makes life a little more tense and challenging.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what you are doing; your employees are broadly behind the corporate strategy and leadership, and depend on your efforts to keep the company competitive.

Pros

Many talents with global experience.

Cons

Senior management hindering the new talents when they feel threaten. Many dead wood GMs just waiting for their retirement specially in operations and MS IT.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the dead woods managers (GMs/VPs) hindering the innovation. Get rid of the inner circle culture.

Pros

- Challenging work & cool projects
- Working with some of the smartest people on the planet
- Your work will be used by millions of people
- Great pay & perks (proclub, connector bus, best medical coverage on the planet)

Cons

- Long hours
- Forced curve (20/70/10) is not good for a high performance & highly talented team where everyone kick butts, but one person needs to be last and get labeled the bottom 10%
- not all teams are great... if you landed with a bad team or manager, don't let it get to you, do your best, keep a good attitude, wait it out, and find a better team that suits you (there are plenty)

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing the right things like: windows 7, bing, office and servers (sql, exchange, sharepoint)
Get windows mobile 7 out

Pros

there are nice training. your peers are usually smart. there are some challenging problems to work with. this place is best for college graduates for the first job.

Cons

the pay is low. vendors usually are paid much higher. advancing is kinda slow for tech company. this is a company that is no longer in growth stage.

Advice to Senior Management

the biggest problem is that there are too many so called "leaders" and middle managements. i don't know what they are doing anyways.

Pros

Good global brand- giving good value on your CV
Large MNC- hence giving a lot of good exposure

Cons

More uncertainty around where company is going now.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on what will bring the company to the next level instead of trying to be in every market.
Management to show recognition for 'workers' instead of 'talkers'

Pros

- Windows 7++ Best OS in the world! and they let you learn all about it!
- Switching groups is easy and there's lot of options: search(bing :( ), gaming (xbox), cloud (azure), OS (windows), mail (hotmail :( ), Apps ( Office)

Cons

- below average pay
-low bonus

Advice to Senior Management

- Done an awesome job with xbox and Windows 7!
- Gotta start recognizing employees more

Pros

Exposure to the complexities of innovation vs regulation in an enterprise leader and global company

Cons

Difficult to climb the ranks if entering in the high 50's to low 60's leveling - resolve to be a cog in a machine.

Advice to Senior Management

Clean up the fat in the exec ranks, divest!

Pros

opportunities to move to other projects inside company (not easy but possible). good health plan especially for people with families, gaining experience of shipping software used by many around the world, decent cafeterias, PRO sports club

Cons

hierarchical structure of the company, stack ranking practices, pay level awareness, micromanagement, doubts about long term prospects of the company, layoffs, limited freedom to select ways how to do stuff, high cost of errors leads to abundance of processes and procedures in many projects

Advice to Senior Management

flatten the company, reduce number of levels, promote peer review. reward successful teams rather than the art of writeup of yearly commitments, more freedom to move within company, improve software reuse and sharing across company, provide top notch software development tools, computers, monitors, come up with new innovative projects rather than chasing established leaders

Pros

location. Closer location to work in if you live in Redmond. Has tons of cash, so if you happen to be on projects that management likes, resource typically is not a problem.

Cons

Too big of a company. Too many layers of management. The company top managements is run by MBA's, not tech folks, so they only care about money.

Advice to Senior Management

Hope you realize what Microsoft has become....the very company you were trying to avoid when you started --- IBM. You need to cut out more management layers and hire more minorities and women into your upper management.