Great Company but being on the right team is important
Pros
- Competitive base pay - Good bonus and stock for higher levels (Senior band and above) - Excellent benefits - probably close to the best around - Product organizations are highly respected and easy to move around - Product organization are interested in your career and will help you succeed and treat failure as a learning experience (just don't keep failing) - Work-Life balance is pretty good most of the time (there are some exceptions)
Cons
- Bonus is OK for lower level bands but stock is minimal - IT organization (MSIT) has a bad reputation in Product organizations (if you go into IT it's hard to get out) - IT org is much too political and if you show poor performance during a review they'd rather get rid of you instead of helping you succeed - IT org engineering groups rely too much on off-shore vendors and are vendor heavy. - IT org engineering FTE employees don't get to code as much as Product groups so your skills will atrophy if you don't do something else to supplement. - Culture is deteriorating because Microsoft is just too big.
