When it comes to working environment, Microsoft has evolved a lot in the last couple of years. The evolution was triggered mostly by getting rid of the draconian stack ranking review system where even great engineers could get poor reviews. However, there`s still much to improve before I could say Microsoft has a friendly and truly cooperative environment and a meritocracy based rewards system.
There`s still a lot of politics where the people who rub the managers back the most are the first being rewarded; most engineers there are not really interested in helping each other; rewards are not based on results and talent, but on politics and the number of years they have been working there.
When it comes to work life balance, some managers push people to work very hard, but when they do so and achieve great results, there`s little to no recognition for that. In some managers mind, working 12-14 hours a day is just expected; other managers might not push you too hard, but don`t expect any recognition from them as well. To be fair, it`s fairly quick to get promotions from lower levels, but from mid to higher levels (62 and up), it becomes very difficult: just results and talent is not enough, politics is required.
When it comes to compensation, the base salary is fair / aligned with the industry, but stocks and bonuses are well below similarly recognized companies, so compensation altogether is 50-150k below companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Amazon.
