Great place to work if you learn how the org works; frustrating and mysterious if you don't... - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
30 Dec 2008
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I love working for Microsoft. It's the best job I've had. I'm a high-performer, and have been well compensated for it. I've owned my own company, and have held leadership positions in a variety of different types of orgs and can truly say that, on balance, it's awesome. Smart, talented people. Fantastic benefits. Great to have stock grants versus options (particularly given the market). Good work/life balance especially if you have a family. High degree of freedom to define your role, and manage your own business as a 'field' employee (versus Corporate). If you understand how big organizations work, and know how to navigate them, you'll do well here. Where people fall down is assuming they can change the organization without really understanding how it works first.

Cons

The organization is byzantine. It takes, easily, 6 months to begin to understand the basic breakdown between the different groups. It's also hard to find any one spot where you can understand how all the pieces fit together. This can be extremely frustrating initially, and also makes it difficult to find the people you need to in order to accomplish your goal. Corporate is sometimes slow to respond to either the concerns of the field, or of the customer. Incentives between parts of the organization are sometimes not well aligned. We also tend to be a little too focused on our internal organization versus the needs of the customer.

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5.0
27 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

good work life balance, culture and career growth

Cons

less compatitive salary compare to other big company

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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