My experience at Microsoft has been very good. - Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
14 Feb 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Microsoft offer some really good perks. The base salary is good and the ESPP(employee stock purchase plan) is well designed. The health benefits were very good in past but they are not as good as they used to be. You get to work on some really challenging projects. You have to keep learning and updating yourself at your job. This is not something that you do in your off time. You have to learn new technologies to perform your day-to-day work. Some of the people here are very talented. They are scary intelligent and you have a hard time to gauge their potential. A wide range of employees are average but average for Microsoft may be extra ordinary for some other companies.

Cons

The work-life balance is very off. We have frequent releases and every release brings long hours at office. Sometimes, we don't have enough time to fix a problem at the very core. We are racing against time and we have to provide a workable solution to the problem as soon as possible. There are very few team morale events.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

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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