You have succeeded in growing earnings, but failed in reducing confusion around long term strategies for growth. - Senior Marketing Manager Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
15 Jul 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Microsoft believes its mission is to provide people around the world with tools that enable them to make their lives better. Tools that empower people to communicate, solve problems and innovate. Its a noble cause, for which one can feel some measure of pride. Microsoft is growing, perhaps not as much as we would all like, but it is increasing employees every year. The opportunities across professional disciplines, businesses and geographies are significant. Want to work overseas? Pick a country; transferring is relatively easy. Want to work on an incubation product, or perhaps the big dog Windows? Ok. Transferring between business groups can be done too. One can amass a diver portifolio of experiences here. It offers a unique career development landscape. And because Microsoft has such a diverse set of businesses, it can weather economic or geographic risk pretty well, meaning it is a place where one can feel some semblance of job security.

Cons

Microsoft is now a very large company. It has all the problems faced by other large compnaies: too much process, too many stakeholders to make decisions quickly, becoming political at the top, too disconnected from customers. It is a complex matrix that can often get in the way of doing the right thing, and doing it quickly.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
22 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The work life balance is great.

Cons

Very little pay not competitive.

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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