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

If good benefits are important to you, Microsoft is a great place to work. But you must be prepared to drink the cool aid.

Cons

There are some smart and great folks in the company, but they tend to be in certain places in the organization. Be very careful what organization you land in as some are well known to be the places that the less than impressive folks get parked.

Advice to Senior Management

I didn't have much exposure to Senior Management at my level.

Pros

Microsoft has a diverse population of very intelligent people with some wonderful ideas. The products are good and the company does give back to the community.

Cons

Microsoft is not very agile, frequently duplicates efforts, does NOT respect a 40 hour work week, and a re-org is just around the corner.

Advice to Senior Management

Formalute and stick with one vision. Make sure your middle tier of management is following through on the vision and doing more than empire building. While developers are important, the consumer is king.

Pros

You can work with lots of smart hard work person.
You have lots of chance to work on project across different teams.
It has very established process of software development process.

Cons

Too big to change fast. Political issues everywhere.
Not all leads are good at management.
Development tools need to be improved.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to rethink the PM vs. Dev vs. Test organization structure.

Pros

Best Minds in Business, Best Business practices and ample chances of growth

Cons

Formalized structure as compared to Google

Advice to Senior Management

Encourage Innovative thinkers; If possible screen people for their potential in innovation and encourage them to come up with new product ideas

Pros

1. Great benefits
2. Working on products that is used by millions of people.
3. Lots of options on what you want to work on.

Cons

1. Being a company with 60,000 plus employees, there is some bureaucracy seeping in.
2. Difficult to bring about change.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Stop trying to force customers bundles of MS software, which don't even work togather well.
2. Why is it that we make IE and it is the slowest browser on Windows? Takes longest to install and update.

Pros

- Lots of opportunities to learn. This is especially good if you are just starting out your career
- Given a lot of individual responsibility unlike some other companies
- Depending on what you are working. the work can be rewarding as it will have a very wide audience

Cons

- Geeky and nerd culture is prevalent.
- You feel as if your whole life revolved revolved around Microsoft

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs to put its best brains into the web-based application and web-content fields so it can effectively compete against Google and the like. The paradigm shift towards Web-based computing is looking more and more possible especially for the average consumer. The workstation will always have its place but it may get limited and confined to professional use

Pros

- smart people in lots of places
- very good benefits
- good salary
- career-wise it is clear where to go, not clear how to get there though

Cons

- senior leadership of the company does not seem to know how to move beyond Windows/Office
- lots of places in the company are very heavy on process and process is actually celebrated as a great thing sometimes to the point of losing sight that the only thing that matters is shipping great products.
- Microsoft bubble - very inward looking, most people have low awareness of what happens in the rest of the world in terms of new technologies, platforms, languages, innovations, etc. It is true that Microsoft creates its own gravity field but still.
- Promotions especially at senior levels require a lot of political skill.

Advice to Senior Management

I wish I had one. I think at the highest level they have no clue what to do even though they are trying really hard and the company has a ton of smart people. It makes you wonder with so many good people what is missing.

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

Good benefits
Reputed brand.
Easier to get a job in it when compared to Yahoo, Google and Other Great Companies.

Cons

May not suite all kinds of people, Is not a place for geeks.
In order to advance in microsoft an engineer would need 80% HR skills and 20% technical skills.
Most of the people who work here are oblivious of the outside world and are still in same set of mind as it was 25 years ago.
Creativity, out of box thinking, analytical thinking are neither encouraged nor valued.

Advice to Senior Management

Fresh mindset is to be encouraged, and concentration should be more on developing a great products, great idea rather than just worrying about revenue