Great policies, culture, learning oppurtunities and caring; poor non-tech managers without vision and insights
Pros
Company is politically very matured, in terms of all details in policies, activities, learning resources, caring for people, etc Company cares people very much: strongly supports work/life balance, advocates 20% office hour in courses learning, provides top-level resources such as gyms, shuttles, snacks, campus environment etc Company is very famous and people are respected/admired by outsiders Company has a unique position "Program manager" which other companies don't have: it's a lowest level position same with SDE, but it strongly develops people's soft skills -- inter-personal skills, think bigger, manage teamwork, improve product life cycle, etc.-- a really great position to gain growth rapidly!
Cons
A myth here is, PM, Dev and Test are "3 pillars". In fact PMs are the most important one here -- they're half the leadership team. They're also under the most workload. Devs are the most cost effective -- least workload, mild-paced promotion. Tests are the most tedious and of the most workload, and least participated in strategic discussions in all. Being in such a monster company, no one has high efficiency -- sometimes >50% time is spent to handle ugly labor cases such as upgrade, side by side, security, backward compatibility, etc; many bugs on >10 year C/C++ codebase need to be fixed before being able to write in C#; huge external dependencies on other timezoned ares (typically Redmond) are painful, you have to mail them a question and get reply tomorrow, then you modify your question the day after -- typical global-scoped work is as slow as crazy. But the worst thing is the shabby manager level. As a 3/4 year old campus, most managers and leads are less than 3 year in microsoft, most of them are Chinese industry hires from companies not comparable to Microsoft; thus they share a common serious problem, lack of leading abilities and real insights. A bunch of mediocre leaders are ruining the great dreams of excellent 1-from-1000 engineers.
