Great people, lousy place to make a meaningful career. - Group Program Manager, Technology Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
15 May 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Microsoft is a great company the develops the best software in the world. You will never lack for resources to do your job and their are a lot of very bright, dedicated people you will work with. They give you the best computing resources you want - many employees have 2 or 3 computers. Best of all you also get access to all of Microsoft's software. The latest and greatest versions of Office, Windows, SQL, SharePoint, etc. In many groups, you also have a lot of responsibility - kind of like a startup, where you wear lots of hats and much is expected of you. Most of your co-workers are dedicated, smart and really committed to doing the right thing for customers as well.

Cons

Forget about a life outside of work. You will always have more work than you can do and lots of pressure to complete it all. The bureaucracy is at an all time high and the organization moves at a snails pace for most things. Even though you have a lot of responsibility, there are lots of internal politics and cross company issues that make it difficult to make real changes without more effort than you can possibly believe. You would think that the best software company in the world would have great internal systems, but they don't. Lastly, the pay is horrible. Every year, they come out with lame reasons and explanations that pay is really not so bad and that you should be honored to work at Microsoft, but it doesn't do justice to the amount of work most of the employees put in.

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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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