Good place to learn and profit elsewhere - Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Jan 6, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You'll learn a lot especially from technical area, a lot of challenging tasks and a level of expected quality is quite high. They also really expect you to deliver at the deadline, so pressure is high but it might push you above your limit. If you want to learn there are a handful of resources and smart people to learn from. Also engineers get a lot of freedom in a way they accomplish their goals, it's mostly delivering them that counts, not the path you select...

Cons

It’s mostly delivering that counts, so some people don't care that much about quality. There don't seem to be a good mechanism for (technical) quality validation. Again this is a very large company and things probably look different in other teams, especially in states when they do all really important stuff. There is also this weird culture, where people are mostly concerned about who will look bad on end year review and not taking any risks to help others, if it might make them look bad.

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5.0
Jun 26, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

benefit and wlb are good

Cons

a lot of layoffs lately

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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