forced curve stack ranking is brutal for regular employees. Cushy ride for managers - Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
24 Mar 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

good name recognition in your resume. get an idea of the scale of work in a big company. If you are a manager it is cushy ride. If you are an employee very difficult for a developer due to constant deadlines and demands, OK for program manager and testers

Cons

too much process and bureaucratic. constant change in direction is normal. Common to reset the project direction every few months and start from scratch. Stack ranking (where employees are compared to each other in their level every few months and forced into a curve distribution) is brutal. If you are a developer here, you don't feel like you are competing with the other companies to deliver a better product , instead you are competing with your coworker. Coworkers will not help each other, instead will backstab each other so that they finish higher in the curve. It is a bit easier if you are a program manager, because you don't have any real deadlines. Developers have a deadline almost daily and put in crazy hours in most teams. Also easier if you are a lead, since you typically would delegate all work to reports, get credit for all successes but are typically not blamed for project failures, Manager has to fill up a slot between 1 to 5 (performance grade) in their team by force. This is called stack ranking and is very political. About 2 months of the year, managers just spend time doing that. Typically they pick least favorite employees for 4 or 5 . And by HR rule , they have to contantly tell them they are underperforming so that those employees leave soon. Also internal transfers are only possible for people who get 1 or 2 rating. The other employees are ignored during internal applications. There are also many ethnic cabals inside there. There is also an official internal effort to force out older employees and replace they with younger employees. For managers though, there is no such effort. Managers are treated as gods by the company.

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5.0
26 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

benefit and wlb are good

Cons

a lot of layoffs lately

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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