TSP review - Inside Sales Specialist Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
10 Nov 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Brand name is good in your CV You will meet great people, but those are the ones that leave the quickest Food: Good food choice but you have to pay for it Gym: Good facilities and courses, good price

Cons

Management is extremely bad. Managers do not listen at all to the team, it is all about their image. Management has 0 product knowledge and hence have no clue what is going on. Management is hired externally with what seems no appropriate experience for the position. Leadership is non-existent. They can not be looked up to or seen as models, as they are not knowledgeable, do not communicate, do not respect peoples time as they are always unpunctual, don’t care about the team. Management does not listen or achieve anything for the team. You feel like completely left to yourself. They are said to be people managers, but they do not inspire, encourage, motivate... It is as if management is non-existant... Very high fluctuation in the company. Good people leave (some of them try to stay for one year in order to keep the relocation money), less qualified employees are the ones who stay… The hiring process is very poor, there is no criteria for hiring, it is simply hard getting people with language skills for certain markets, so they hire randomly. There is no transparency in levels. No career opportunities, just very limited, and specially for those who play fake and nice with management, not for skilled people, but for the ones who suck it up to management. Extremely bad onboarding process. Once you start, training is equal to 0. Everything is digitalized, so the product knowledge you have to gain in order to carry out your job comes from videos. There is some mentoring from colleagues from Inside Sales, but not structured and very limited. No real training plan is made for new hires and you have to figure out yourself how you gain your knowledge. It is always said that they give you the time you need to learn, but all the learning is self-learning from videos or whatever source you find. At a given point you have to start working, no matter if you know about the product or not. The decision is just randomly made by management with no knowledge checks or whatsoever. All in all, onboarding and learning process is not structured, no knowledge checks, no coaching from management. If you start new with no product knowledge, expect to be left all to yourself and with no guidance at all. TSP role: you are the worst paid and the last involved in the selling process, with 0 communication with the team. Supposedly TSPs are to be the Microsoft reference team (with most technical knowledge) for a certain product in a market, but new hires do not get prepared for this at all, they are just dropped into that position and have to figure out all by themselves what to do, learn the product, etc. The buddy system does not work at all. When you start new you get a buddy, but he is of no use at all. He/she will not teach you anything or orient you in any way.

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5.0
5 June 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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