Great Benefits and Work life Balance - Horrible Promotion, Growth and Culture. - Visual Designer Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
10 Mar 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Microsoft takes great care of their people, the benefits are some of the best in tech, you can take pretty much all the PTO you want regardless of what you're actually rewarded, the annual perks are really great and the bonus structure is generally pretty great without requiring you to boast or dump on your peers.

Cons

Zero, and I mean ZERO, structure around career growth. People spend years at MS being under-leveled with no path to promotion, and completely subjective decisions because managers are overpowered in this department and actual impact has no effect on their decisions - it's a popularity contest, so if you're not you managers favorite, you're never getting promoted. It's relatively easy to move around to try and correct that but it can also set you back YEARS because your new team doesn't really care about the blood you spilled on the last product. Managers are just the best IC in the room and have zero actual management skills along with training that just requires them to FF a video and show no proof of competency. This is the biggest issue with Microsoft, they don't hire people that are good managers to be managers - being the best programmer or designer has NOTHING to do with being a good manager and they simply don't get that.

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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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