Great place to learn and further your career; if you can deal with the bureaucratic BS - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
11 Jun 2008
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Being surrounded by great people, great process, and inundated with "Best Practice" causes you to learn in a year what it would take 3-5 years to learn anywhere else. You also have the ability to have a huge impact in your customers/ your company and most manager's I've had are very hands-off which also helps you to help grow. Working in an environment where there is constant change is stressful at first but helps you to learn to deal with change; a skill that is useful for the rest of your life.

Cons

Work/Life balance can be a problem, depending upon the role. The compensation and benefits package in non-US subsidiaries is sub-par compared to the US Sub (especially the health care package). The tools and business practices are not standardized between the US and non-US subs either. The MS Performance system claims to be based upon metrics and to eliminate favortism, but when all is said and done, your manager will argue for you in the "Calibration meetings" if he/she likes you, and lesser-so if they don't. Favortism and the "good 'ole boys" club is alive and well; both in performance reviews and hiring. The focus on performance metrics has caused FAR too many people to lose focus on what is best for customers and the company; everyone is busy trying to check off items for their performance reviews and inflate their metrics instead of providing cusotmers with better products and services. The combination of the focus on metrics vs. what is right and the fact that many teams are geographically distributed and never physically see each other causes the team dynamic to break down and causes a lot of back stabbing. In a nutshell there's too much of a focus on individual performance vs. team performance.

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5.0
7 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting and varied work. Seasonality to the job allows for rest period

Cons

Less stability than there used to be makes people afraid to take risks

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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