I found this brief essay online today and it's definitely worth the read.  I've mentioned some of the tenets in past posts, but I whole-heartedly agree with Michael's assessment of the life and lifestyle within Microsoft.  Granted, though I was not on a product team or working on-campus as I was in our Salt Lake City branch office, much of what he said was directly applicable.

Individuals within the halls at Microsoft have a passion and a focus for software.  Software is the bread and butter of everything.  There is very little paperwork at all - pretty much everything besides the periodic reviews and printed expense reports (which simply provide a backup to the electronically filed expense reports) is done via software.

The two downsides that Michael mentions that stood out to me are Work/Life Balance and Managers.  He's spot on.  It seems that while the mantra is that one should strike a good, healthy, working balance between work and family life, it is the tendency of managers to judge that work is more important if you had to make a decision (of course it didn't help that my managers were in the Denver office).  Any decision to the contrary is detrimental to your review scores.

He mentions that 'most of lower management should be tossed'.  I'm behind him there.  In fact, I feel that's a big part to my being disillusioned in some respects.  Don't get me wrong, I love the leadership (BillG, SteveB, etc) and a select few of middle/upper management, but my direct managers left a lot to be desired and are probably the primary reasons and catalysts as to why I left in the first place.  I strongly feel that I'd work for MS again if I were to have different (and local) management.

All in all, a very good post.