Microsoft: If You Want to Work for a Big Company, Go MSFT... - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Apr 22, 2008
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

MSFT is an awesome big company--great benefits, great work-life balance, great job security. It's a great place to work on world-leading software franchises and have an opportunity to have a scope of impact that most start-ups only can dream about. The people there are pretty smart too. Also since they've implemented a lot more touchy-feely things in the performance management system, people are much nicer and more human. All in all a great overall work environment for a huge company.

Cons

Although it's a great place to work for a big company, it is a big company. Too many people making too few decisions. Far too many people I know spend their time working and reworking and reworking powerpoint slides that can be reviewed, chewed on and re-edited again to show to someone else. This lack of single point of accountability was really bad. Also, with so many people career advancement is getting to be pretty difficult. It's getting very tenure based, like a Proctor and Gamble. This is a bummer. Finally, I think that too few people really have the technical and customer passion that's needed there. Few people are really up to speed on the latest products coming out from competitors or how our customers interact with them. This is a bad habit and too many people have gotten lazy.

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5.0
Jun 1, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good peer interns and full time researchers

Cons

I don't like this city.

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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