Pros
Beautiful campus Flexible work policies are common Free drinks Smart people to work with Great Health Care- but this is changing significantly in 2013
Cons
Review System- it has become more important to "manage your career" than create great products Review System- Promotes back stabbing and an unhealthy, toxic work environment Bloated software products that no longer delight the industry Horrible software licensing system Engineering "silos" of developer/test/program management which are ineffective and inefficient I left Microsoft after 13 years. For the first 11 years, I received excellent performance evaluations. Then, when the review system changed, I suddenly found myself to be rated a poor performer- despite being the only person in my group to actually deliver a feature that shipped! Once you get a bad review, you are labeled as such and a comeback is extremely unlikely. I decided to leave before enduring more undeserved humiliation. I now work on open source software, and have replaced all of my windows based devices and software with open source, Apple, and Android equivalents. This turned out to be much easier than expected- leading me to realize that Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant.