About as "meh" as it gets. - Senior Software Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
16 June 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good teammates, depending on team. The salary is better than those of most startups. The stock is not just lottery tickets unlike most startups. Some great benefits, such as the ability to put additional $33K (instant Roth conversion) into your 401K after topping off your max annual contribution ($22.5K) and Microsoft's match ($10K). Decent LWB. Decent perks. Okay insurance.

Cons

From what I hear, not all organizations within MS are the same. I, however, have only seen one. In my org, we have a codebase that is truly unpleasant to work with. It is bad in every imaginable way, from size, to readability, to performance, to architecture. What makes this worse is the fact that engineers are expected to do the work of product and project managers as well as DevOps. That's in addition to our own work. Theoretically we have product people, but I've never seen them do anything useful except maybe some really high-level stuff. Everything that a PM does in any other company, your team is expected to do. You will see a lot of people who've been at MS for decades. They've not seen much else, or have seen it so long ago that they have no understanding of the current state of tech. And because they've been here for so long, they have a lot of weight. That's why that codebase is such a disaster and why it will remain a disaster despite constant efforts and initiatives to improve it. No architect is ever gonna say "I messed up, this is all bad, delete it" or "We decided to use tech X because it seemed cool, but we don't actually know how to use it, so we applied it in the same exact way as we know how to apply the old tech Y". And despite tech X actually being awesome, the team produced a monstrosity because all they know is tech Y and reading a couple of tutorials didn't help. To be fair, there are a lot of smart people here, who care about code quality, but the higher a person gets in rank, the more they care about looking important and covering their own behind. The company itself is gigantic and therefore a bureaucratic nightmare with proportional amounts of Kool-Aid being distributed. After the layoffs we are expected to "do more with less" (as if that wasn't already the case) and we won't get a cost-of-living pay increase this year because of "difficult economic situation and uncertainty". That was announced a few weeks after a record-breaking profits announcement. There is also an eternal corporate song in the air, about supporting the latest trend. At the moment it's diversity, inclusion, equity, social justice, etc. Obviously, the company doesn't actually care, none of them do, but it has to project an appearance or be eaten alive on Twitter. So just smile and wave and you'll be fine. Overall, it's just another large corporation. You can have an amazing experience, or you can have a terrible experience. It all depends purely on the org/team that you end up in/on.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
30 June 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Love it you are surrounded with smart people and complex problem to solve

Cons

Lots of new features and roll outs happening hard to keep pace

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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