Average pay and decent perks can only distract from deep technical and leadership issues for so long. - Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
26 June 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are some very smart people here, and some very interesting technology. Lots of fun techie toys to play with in the course of your job, and a decent amount of support (sometimes) for doing things in new and better ways. The pay is decent, if you can avoid getting screwed over by the recruiter when you first start. Work life balance is typically respected, and it's extremely easy to get time off or work flex time when you need to. The locale is good, with lots of things to do when you aren't working. Plus you get to make Balmer Chair jokes.

Cons

The review and promotion system is pretty obviously designed to pit employees against each other. Like grading on a curve, which makes no sense if you want to hire a bunch of really smart people and keep them all motivated and happy. Management is fumbling and confused, and seemingly care more about making one or two feel-good changes they can put their name on and leverage into a better position elsewhere than actually improving products or the business. Oftentimes lip service is paid to "Engineering Excellence", and then scrapped immediately when Bizdev remembers something they should have told you months earlier. Good work goes unnoticed unless it's on some shiny, highly visible area; which is fine, except that it creates an environment where the basics aren't attended to because they're a career dead end and nobody wants to take that hit. Finally, hiring standards have lowered drastically in the past several years, so there are a lot of people who really shouldn't be working there but are now impossible to get rid of. At least they help pad out the lower end of the review scale.

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5.0
12 June 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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