Pathetic company for developers - Senior Tech Lead Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
25 Feb 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

A lot of politics and lies by almost everyone who can lie(80-90% of employees) except freshers and few moral folks. Good for those who are unqualified not so good engineers but ok in interviews, don't know much but can blabber in meetings and likes to play dirty lies and politics. I am sure some of the people watching this review will be happy cuz there are lot of thankless liars and political folks dying to earn money and respect even if it comes by deceit. Overall pretty pathetic culture and only good for such politics ridden people. The company still works well only because of few good engineers, the legacy of good old products, copy of new software services like azure as a pure copy of AWS etc and ok ceo who is good at acquisitions, monetization, and politics. Also, managers are ready to invest in extra below average engineers who likes to play their slave than good solid engineers and actually they can survive by creating new issues and redoing same stuff. Who knows what is going on in the code except good engineers, they justify wrong and incorrect things. The services actually suffer a lot of issues and life of engineers becomes hell fixing and monitoring them.

Cons

A lot of politics and lies by almost everyone who can lie(80-90% of employees) except freshers and few moral folks. Good for those who are unqualified not so good engineers but ok in interviews, don't know much but can blabber in meetings and likes to play dirty lies and politics. I am sure some of the people watching this review will be happy cuz there are lot of thankless liars and political folks dying to earn money and respect even if it comes by deceit. Overall pretty pathetic culture and only good for such politics ridden people. The company still works well only because of few good engineers, the legacy of good old products, copy of new software services like azure as a pure copy of AWS etc and ok ceo who is good at acquisitions, monetization, and politics. Also, managers are ready to invest in extra below average engineers who likes to play their slave than good solid engineers and actually they can survive by creating new issues and redoing same stuff. Who knows what is going on in the code except good engineers, they justify wrong and incorrect things. The services actually suffer a lot of issues and life of engineers becomes hell fixing and monitoring them. Overall if you are a good human being who likes to contribute and play fair, this company is hell. It's full of liars, cheaters, dirty politics, unfair practices in review and work management. But if you can play politics along with these cheaters, you may not get to do great work and responsibilities but can survive and grow. In sort, Awesome for low quality engineers who like to play poor politics and culture.

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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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