Unethical practices - Senior Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
26 Nov 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Zero good points; please read the Con. Also, I encourage potential candidates to look at the ratings that are low scores. I have noticed that when a honest feedback is given; Microsoft cronies often bombard the feedback site with high ratings to cover up the truth about their company. So, please do yourself a favor and look at the bad ratings for the truth.

Cons

Managers play favorites based on personalities versus results, managers love flashy shining things versus content or substance, managers share personal information of their employees with the employee's peers, managers are often threaten by employees who know more than they do, and managers often do not have the background and experience to perform their roles and are often very defensive as a result. Culturally, Microsoft has a challenge of too much in fighting, too many people worried about show casing sales type slides in PowerPoint versus the content shared being real or providing value to the company because managers do not understand what they should be looking at, no emphasis on results and more about marketing (mostly vaporware), too many arguments of a word or term such as one that remembered "what is a application versus a platform?" (I thought Microsoft should have known this by now); and the culture is one that no one can truly advance without stepping on others as a regular practice and declaring their work as your work. Politically - this environment is the most politically charged environment that I have worked in. Of course there is politics in every company and very bad people in every company. However, not at this magnitude. Even Human Resources has told me in the past they see the bad behaviors and are working on it. So, I waited 8 years and still no improvements. Things have simply became worse than ever.

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5.0
7 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting and varied work. Seasonality to the job allows for rest period

Cons

Less stability than there used to be makes people afraid to take risks

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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