Great place to work. Not the right fit if you are career oriented and ambitious. - Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Mar 11, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Microsoft has by and large smart people. You will spend your day interacting with them, and they in turn will stretch you. People are passionate about what they work on, are vocal about it, and you will like most of your colleagues. Great access to information across the company - from other teams to the library and Microsoft Research. It is also a great place to experience different kinds of technology and you can move with relative ease across the company. Benefits are amazing. Work-life balance is highly possible. The culture is in general very inclusive.

Cons

If you are looking to make money, rise rapidly, Microsoft is not for you. There are layers upon layers of management and bureaucracy. Promotions are often handed out, not based on your merit, but on how well your manager can argue for you. Projects can go on indefinitely as management can often be clueless or lacking the spine to make changes. Microsoft is slow to react to changes in the market. If an organization is under-performing, it will be atleast 2 years before a change in leadership happens, and another 3 before the right direction is visible in the market. In the meantime, competition can have a field day.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

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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