A 12+ year Software Developers' thoughts
Pros
Microsoft Brand. Even a remote villager on the other side of the world will know & respect you. Good values they stand for. You will see some active ongoing work on BLM issue; you will see candid care & timely response for COVID etc. There are still some good engineers & managers left at Microsoft. Good Benefits. No/very less bureaucracy - Directors/Partners will often chat with you and help you resolve technical stuff. Most of the Senior Management is technically Sound.
Cons
Very poor rewards compared to similar roles in the industry. for ex: for Principal role competitors pay over 80%. Many teams in Azure are stuck in REPETITIVE work like migrating from PAAS V1 infrastructure to the PAAS V2 infra, rotating Certificates etc. Very unproductive. Several quarters - teams would not deliver an ounce of actual Service features - but, just the technical debt. Leadership, higher up - lacked vision & failed to align this well back in 2012 - azure inception times and existing new developers are taking a hit because of that. Poor tech Vision, atleast in Azure. Satya Nadella, the great visionary and exceptional leader - tells a lot of cool stuff - but the middle management doesn't seem to give a damn. Most of them have no idea what he is telling. They don't get time to follow him :). For ex: no/very few managers follows growth mindset or Leadership principles or hiring-in as an interviewing philosophy. They are good people. Just that, they are so worked up - that there won't be any time left to listen to these. Most of the Teams across the company are moving to Services model. You will end up working 24/7; no family nights; no weekends - if you know stuff :). Rewards and Compensation model - almost incentivizes people to not share information and work in isolation. This has a huge negative impact on the Culture. Culture in many teams is close to Toxic. Large delay between MS Polls. Or in general - data about how things are going or employee experience - is collected like - once in an Year! By the time the data is collected - most of the times - the problems faced become irrelevant. Movement inside the company is not easy. Especially, Principal engineers have extra diversity based rules - which reduces the available options from an already reduced set.
