Great Benefits and Work life Balance - Horrible Promotion, Growth and Culture.
Pros
Microsoft takes great care of their people, the benefits are some of the best in tech, you can take pretty much all the PTO you want regardless of what you're actually rewarded, the annual perks are really great and the bonus structure is generally pretty great without requiring you to boast or dump on your peers.
Cons
Zero, and I mean ZERO, structure around career growth. People spend years at MS being under-leveled with no path to promotion, and completely subjective decisions because managers are overpowered in this department and actual impact has no effect on their decisions - it's a popularity contest, so if you're not you managers favorite, you're never getting promoted. It's relatively easy to move around to try and correct that but it can also set you back YEARS because your new team doesn't really care about the blood you spilled on the last product. Managers are just the best IC in the room and have zero actual management skills along with training that just requires them to FF a video and show no proof of competency. This is the biggest issue with Microsoft, they don't hire people that are good managers to be managers - being the best programmer or designer has NOTHING to do with being a good manager and they simply don't get that.
