Pros
Microsoft was so valuable in teaching me skills I could use to be an effective program manager at scale. Getting to interface with an external product with thousands of customers has been awesome and I've gotten to learn how to collaborate and create roadmaps with the technical writers, software engineers, and fellow PMs of my product. I also really loved getting to dive deep into customer telemetry and come up with data-driven decisions. Microsoft has a great infrastructure to do so. I was fortunate enough to be a PM right out of college in Azure Developer Division which focuses on Developer tooling. I think Microsoft set me up with the enterprise-level industry experience that has made me a competitive candidate out in the market. The people there are very intelligent and work hard within the bounds of a VERY healthy work life balance. People take plenty of vacation and days of throughout the year. I've loved the folks I've worked with for the most part and managers are awesome!
Cons
Salary compensation takes a big dip between years 3-6 which is when you see most folks at Microsoft leaving. I left close to year 4 to get my fair market price. Most people come back to Microsoft as a Senior PM or higher for work life balance and to chill. The majority of new hires have more than 7-10 years of experience. I noticed that I saw more Senior and Principal PMs than PM 2s towards the end of my career. Let that sink in. Microsoft is a Service provider. They care more about supporting more and more platforms and languages aka growing horizontally ("We need to support a Python on App Service, and Rust on App Service... and every other language and version!") than making what they have into a spectacular product. .NET releases and support takes up big chunks of dev time. Resources tend to get spread thin with so many things to support and less progress is made from a customer experience and feature set standpoint. The upper leadership moves very slowly and doesn't like taking risks. If you're a fast mover, you'll likely feel "slowed down" or "asked for further justification as to why it fits on the current roadmap" very often by upper leadership. If you're frustrated by this,