Your career at Microsoft is what you will make out of it. It is up to you to chart your sucess here. - Finance Manager Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
24 Feb 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Ability to move around different roles, projects, groups, jobs. Microsoft has so many projects and business groups that one can easily find a job or role that you like. There are also many bright people at Microsoft that you can learn from. Benefits at Microsoft are also top notch, especially for those with families. The company also is fairly flexible with work life balance and gives employees a lot of freedom to set their own schedule. In other words, there is very little micro management done at Microsoft and the attitude is more along the lines of manage your own schedule, just make sure what needs to get done gets done.

Cons

There are many layers of management, sometimes too many. You can get bogged down with meetings upon meetings in order to get buy off from all management levels. Not only does this slow the generation of new ideas, but it also becomes a drag on productivity as many times you will feel like your job's many purpose is to prepare for a meeting. And because this is a large company with many business groups, office politics and fiefdom creation can become prevalent. Finally, there does not seem to be much accountability at the management level so bad decisions often go un-punished.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
2 Jul 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Comfortable and well paid. Very good work life balance

Cons

Too slow, couldn't grow. Growth depended on the team you are in. Can't leave team until SWE II

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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