Did not work for me - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
Mar 5, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great salary but nothing else

Cons

Good old boys and girls club. You HAVE to be liked by everyone if you expect to last at MSFT. You need to be constantly telling everyone how great you. It's a "beauty contest" atmosphere where you always need to have portray how great you are. Big drinking culture too. Most company events havbe minimal food but unlimited drinks, so most people are wasted fairly quickly. Management are doing their best not to get fired and as a result they do whatever they are told as it relates to hiring, firing and promotions. I saw many firings where they told people "your job is in jeopardy" w/o giving actual specifics of what you did. Once you hear that phrase, there is no turning back. Meaning they want you out. Many folks choose to stay and try to turn things around but MSFT will make your life miserable if you take that route.

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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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