Every group at this company is different - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
May 20, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are lots of opportunities to move around and switch roles if you find yourself stuck or don't like what you're working on. Every team has a different culture and different way of doing things. There is no one "Microsoft" way of doing things.

Cons

The benefits package has changed and the healthcare benefit is a pain now. Now we have to deal with co-pays and lots of confusing bills and paperwork at the doctors office. With the old plan, you just walked in, gave them your card and you were done. Now it's just a pain to deal with plus a lot of out of pocket money if you need surgery or anything expensive. The whole rating system of forcing 7% of the employees to get the lowest score is ridiculous. If they tried to force kids in public schools to adhere to this where 7% of them would always be failing just because their peers were doing better, this would be unacceptable. The system feels forced and not truly based on performance. Trying to fit to the perfect curve means a lot of people get scores they don't deserve. (On both ends I might add.) The other thing that bothers me greatly about Microsoft is the low number of female engineers and a very low number of females in leadership positions. It's still very much a "boys club" here.

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5.0
Jul 7, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Smart Engineers, good pay, perk+

Cons

Things can be move very slowly

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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