Pros
* Great benefits and compensation relative to your workload * MSFT stock * Good food * A few nice/smart people
Cons
* Leadership is just trying to keep the lights on and have no unique vision or ideas for the company, mainly just copies what other companies are doing. * Culture is all but dead post-pandemic over-hiring. * Many claims of being data-driven, but it really matters more who is presenting an idea than what the actual data says. * Mind-numbingly obvious organizational woes caused by bad incentives. Engineers aren't rewarded for eliminating bugs, reducing tech-debt, or intelligently leveraging existing open-source. Instead, build another terrible in-house tool, make it as inefficient as possible (so you can claim to "fix" it later), and get promo'd away rather than dealing with any of the unsustainable development decisions you made. Eschew any work that isn't related to your OKRs (as dumb and misguided as they may be) like helping other teams for the common good, because that doesn't matter towards promotions unless it gets to the point that too many people are actively complaining. Don't make your service more efficient to use less hardware, because it just means your team will have a smaller hardware budget next cycle. Managers are promoted for managing more people, so unsurprisingly there's way too much middle-management. * Weird fake positivity, a strong vibe of preferring to pretend that things are great rather fixing problems. Bringing up issues usually reflects more negatively on you than it does whoever caused them. * No accountability for bad decision making, failures are addressed by throwing people lower on the totem pole under the bus (or pretending they were actually a success by some measure that wouldn't stand up to any real scrutiny--which doesn't really happen, see the above).