Massive degradation since retirement of Bill Gates - Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) II Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
1 Mar 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Brand name, good salary, work from home facilities, good medical reimbursement, free transport to/from home, decent work-life balance

Cons

Politics and regional/linguistic favoritism is the bottom line of this company. Once legendary Microsoft interviews are now run by temporary HR contractors, who just care about meeting hiring targets. No accountability from senior management about quality of people being recruited. Government jobs like concept of "reservation" has silently creeped in the recruiting process - drastically separate levels of technical questions for top colleges(tough interview questions) and 2nd string colleges (cakewalk questions), so that HR can just meet hiring targets. You have to do buttering to your boss if you want any career growth at all, else you will be branded as "lacking soft skills". Technical skills and your work have zero value. Rather than working for a common goal of creating great products, the company culture encourages people to step on others head and prove your "visibility", which is nothing but useless chattering and giving junk fundas etc. As part of cost cutting, some of the best in-house engineering systems have been blindly demolished. So many internal scams going on openly. They have banned team outings beyond 100 km distance but there exist several teams in Hyderabad who make trips to exotic destinations under the disguise of "training" and nobody questions it. Internal employee survey is simply used as a means to identify and penalise the "complainers" rather than genuinely addressing the issues. After conducting a so-called "anonymous" annual poll, the HR will conduct team-by-team meetings (if team's review is bad) and will try their best to trap people into talking and indetifying those who raised any issues in the poll. Once you are on the radar for giving any negative feedback, your career is a gone case. Have seen at least 6 people being "managed out". Pathetic degradation of company culture since exit of Bill Gates.

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5.0
5 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Learned a lot, plenty of team work opportunities

Cons

Internship could have been longer than 4 weeks

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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