Opinon of MSFT from a recent grad. - Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Jan 10, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Microsoft is a huge corporation and therefore has lots of opportunities for growth and lateral as well as horizontal movement. Benefits are extremely good compared to other companies and the people here are all very smart and motivated. I feel that Microsoft really appreciates their employees and does a decent job making sure they are as productive as possible. For example, my team is split across two locations and MS regularly flies me to the other location to have one on one meetings. We also regularly have broad team meetings at offsite locations that are quite fun and interesting.

Cons

It takes a long time to get anything done, requiring several levels of approval. People tend not to do what is best for the product but what's best for their career at MSFT. It can be very frustrating when you want to do something that is great for the product but are prevented from doing so for various silly reasons. Also, if you are a developer, get ready to work on a ton of legacy code. This is probably one of the most frustrating aspects, having to deal with code that's 5 or sometimes 10 years old. Sometimes it just doesn't feel like I'm working at a high tech firm.

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5.0
Jul 6, 2026
Anonymous temporary employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great Company to work with.

Cons

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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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