Bright and Shiny, but "buggy" when you peek under the hood - Director Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
18 Apr 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great pay/benefits, casual environment, fantastic on-campus food.

Cons

Bonus/rewards system encourages only chasing after the bright, shiny, high visibility projects...the "Build". Does not recognize or reward "Run" operations. Employees therefore shy away from maintenance or back office operations, and therefore those tend to fail and are substandard. Limited attention span on projects, not well executed or tweaked to run well (considered run). Employees are valued only when assigned to bright-shiny projects, once those roles turn to run, or continuous improvement maintenance type roles, those functions are "low value" throwaway roles. Exceptionally low organizational support to reassign talent from "low value" deemed roles, to absorb elsewhere in the organization. Seems to be a huge loss of talent. Microsoft also abnormally values Microsoft specific experience over industry experience at the mid-management levels. They publically want new ideas, new ways of looking at thing, however in reality, they value the Microsoft way, and internal connections much more.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

4.0
28 Jan 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1. If you love tech, this is a great place. No doubt you'll talk tech (mostly the MSFT stack) from enterprise to consumer - from PCs to phones to Xboxes - from datacenter to desktop. 2. What were GREAT benefits are now VERY GOOD (took a small step down) but still probably better than you'll find at 99% of large corporations. If you've got family - the value of the benefits is even higher. 401k match is nice. 3. Even with it's struggles MSFT is still a cash printing machine. This means if you can keep your nose clean and do reasonable work, you can have a stable job, pay your bills, feed your family, and not worry (too much) about layoffs. The stock you own likely won't tank, but probably won't go up much either. You'll get a bonus each year and some stock. It's a decent life if you aren't looking to light the world on fire.

Cons

Brand on Your Resume: After many years of losing market share and struggling to be at the front end of innovation and the fact that there's 90,000 employees, don't think MSFT is necessarily going to be attractive on your resume to more agile and smaller companies. Managing Your Career: Make you say this out loud so it registers - 90,000 employees work there. Double that for vendors. It is VERY hard to "stand out" and move up in the company. Don't expect your manager to be much of an advocate or enabler to help you meet your career goals - they are basically trying to survive the stack rank every year too. Not familiar with the stack rank? Check out the 2012 Vanity Fair article called "Microsoft's Lost Decade".

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