Good benefits, so-so pay, good CEO, weak executives - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
15 Jun 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good person in new CEO in Satya Good benefits Job security (... mostly) Reasonable work-life balance (depending of the team / project and your ability to work smart) Reasonable mix of talents with people to learn from Good company for your 2nd job in your career if you can get in. Ok-company for graduates at the cost of been brain-washed; you will need time to re-learn reality when you get out of the Microsoft bubble. Bad company late in your career - recruiters do not value your industry experience; internal idiosyncrasy of senior review will take you time to learn and get used to if at all; expect 80% politics and 20% real work.

Cons

Ballmer has sabotaged the company for a decade by not managing his reports at all (left it all to them to solve all problems / make decisions). Satya is a bit naïve about the transformation of the company. He's also green at CEO public communication (see Grace Hopper fiasco). Executives and Senior VPs are very weak, do not follow Satya's direction and spend their time politicizing. Micro-cultures are strong and you never know where you land moving internally. Bad managers can wreak your career. Pay is not keeping up with the competition that moved in Greater Seattle en-force. Too many hardware engineers are rejects from hardware engineering companies like Intel, some horrendous hardware management with overcomplicated designs when instead of putting their fingers in design should... manage! Supply chain management is entitled and wasting the talent from Nokia's device division.

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5.0
26 Jun 2026
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CEO approval
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Pros

benefit and wlb are good

Cons

a lot of layoffs lately

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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