Microsoft reviews

After senior (63) and above, you spend most (literally easily 60%) dealing with politics, making sure you look good, watching out for yourself, covering your back, building alliances. If you choose to stay blind, you may survive if you have good management and they do these for you. Otherwise, no matter how good you are, how much great work you do, you may find yourself thrown under bus very fast, very unexpected and even your manager may not be able to save you. Politics are everywhere, don't get me wrong. However, since only people highly political can survive, senior and above is dominated and ruled by people who have their political empires and what matters most (and sometimes what only matters) is where you are in this political map. A minefield for technical people. It also kills your technical savvy by time and makes you irrelevant for the rest of the industry. If you choose to stay at MS at senior levels for extended periods, make sure you are still marketable or you become the slave of this system.

The company culture seems "stupid". Management ignored problems pushed up from the bottom rungs and even the managers at the lower rungs would hide problems under the rug rather than escalate. Everyone in management was purely focused on hitting their "milestones", rather than ensuring major bugs and problems got fixed. Team leaders pushed employees to simply do as told rather than innovate. Also, upper management pushed "pet projects and features" into products that clearly would gain nothing from adding those features, other than to help someone get promoted for getting his/her feature into the market. It was like working in a Dilbert cartoon strip. Poor decisions are made, engineers try to deliver, critics are silenced and ignored, all the engineers see the train wreck coming, then it happens. upper managers gets promoted for hitting deadlines, the product fails in the market, engineers are punished with bad reviews and quit. Repeat.