This is in regards to working at Turn 10 - Vehicle Artist Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
2 Oct 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The opportunity to work on such great games as Forza and Forza: Horizon was a great experience. The art teams, Vehicle Art in particular, were amazing people to work with and made coming into work everyday enjoyable. The studio had a somewhat decent cafeteria, free soft drinks/coffee/tee and if you had to work late or on weekends they brought in food.

Cons

As an artist you would expect to be making great art. That's not the case at Turn 10. All the fun content creation is outsourced to India and Vietnam. At Turn 10 the artist basically polish and refine the assets that the vendors return. It's often tedious and boring work. On occasion you would have to model or texture something that was missed or incorrect but most of the time you were just touching up something. The other problem with working at Turn 10 and Microsoft in general is they don't tend to hire full time. It's contracts only. If you're good and the team likes you there's a good chance they will hire you back for another contract but if stability is what you're after stay away from Microsoft/Turn 10. Also, you don't actually work for Microsoft you work for an outsource agency that hires you out to Microsoft. This way Microsoft doesn't have to pay you benefits or profit sharing. You can get benefits from your agency but probably not as good as Microsoft gives to its actual employees.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

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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