Depends on your team - Software Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
9 Aug 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Great perks and benefits * If you do the bare minimum and can ship code, this is a place you can collect a decent paycheck and coast pretty much forever * Coworkers are generally good people and nondiscriminatory

Cons

* Microsoft's senior leadership talk a good game, but working on a team day to day doesn't reflect the reality * Way too many egotistical, toxic senior engineers who have coasted for years and silo'd domain knowledge and are "too technical" to let go are the ones who truly run the show. Pray you don't find yourself on a team with one of these. * Outdated tools for building and deploying means even simple straightforward changes are painful to get through, doubly so for legacy products * Lateral moves are completely self-driven. Nobody really cares about your individual career advancement. Managers are too stressed out to do anything but get their features shipped in time * People rave about the WLB but this is entirely team dependent and individually driven. I often see people arrive before 8am and don't leave until past 7pm. * Long meetings. Inefficient meetings. Meetings meetings meetings where people tend to ask "smart" questions and nothing really productive comes out of it

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

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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