Great place to start a career - Software Development Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Jun 12, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

For people just starting their careers Microsoft is an amazing place to gain experience. You will be involved with decision making and building products with huge reach. The workplace is a highly energetic one, where everyone is focused on one thing primarily, how to ship great software and products. You will learn as much about the business of software as you will about actually building it. To thrive in this environment you really need to be passionate about your work and the products you'll help build. You will be working with some of the highest caliber people in the industry and expect to be challenged when just starting out like you have never been challenged. You will start with little responsibility and will need to prove yourself to take on bigger pieces. In my opinion, the people you will collaborate with and learn from is one of the most valuable things you will gain by working at Microsoft.

Cons

The environment is filled with an unnatural distribution of highly intelligent and passionate people and is very charged. It's not uncommon to hear full on yelling when there are disagreements. In fact this is almost part of the Microsoft culture. This certainly varies from team to team, the older more established teams following this pattern more closely. This can take a little getting used to depending on where you're coming from. Every team has it's own culture for how they reward their employees and how they're centered. Dev centered organizations place the most value around the output of developers writting the product code. Other orgs are more equally balanced between value placed on dev, test and PM.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
Jun 7, 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
Jan 28, 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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