Terribly disappointing experience - Software Developer Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
10 Jul 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The buildings are great and landscaping is well maintained.

Cons

The company is right now nothing but a well decorated trash can. From the outside the look is superb but from the inside it is completely rotten. Place is super rife with politics and unless you can play the political game well you will not even get a decent review. Place is filled with managers who want to just save their jobs and care a hoot about everything else. The vanity fair article "Microsoft's lost decade" captures the dismal state of the company very accurately. In fact Redmond operations are still better, the Indian operations are way too worse. No VP cares about the Indian operations and the managers here are having a gala time for the past 10 years taking up only useless projects which are easy to deliver and help them to keep their jobs. There is absolutely zero career growth for anyone and there are people at age 44 and above stuck at development lead levels. Now these people have gotten so accustomed to this culture that they neither want to move from their positions nor wish to create space for anyone else. Also they take out their career related frustrations on their sub-ordinates. A manager's word is final in a review process and there is no way you can contest it. Everything is top down and there is zero scope for bottom up innovation. I was absolutely amazed when I took some new ideas to my development manager and he said he was too old to connect with such latest ideas connecting new technologies in the market. I never went to him with another idea and resigned from my job. All this internal churn is definitely showing up with lackluster releases (read win 8) and failed product lines (tablets, phones). In fact when I joined the company, IE was the market leader with > 90% share of the browser market. Now it is a shame that Chrome has overtaken it in the browser game. The company is as usual surviving on Office and Enterprise. A day someone hits the office suite, Microsoft's game is over.

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5.0
12 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great benefits In federal, you can get a bonus for government clerances Good work culture Value based organization

Cons

lots of change lots of churn federal side does not align to commercial side work life balance is hard with "unlimited PTO"

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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