More and more bureaucratic and politics, less and less innovation. - Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Jun 18, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You typically stands at the frontline of technologies. You have relatively easy and direct access to the source code, spec, and the people who wrote those code. You can get information outsider may not get. There are also lot of training programs and knowledge sharing through various technical discussion alias. In one word, best place to learn Microsoft technology stack (of course). You get chance to work with smarter people. You benefits from it by pushing yourself beyond the limit. Of course you also have to work with mediocre ones as well. Great benefits package.

Cons

With the expansion, more and more bureaucratic and politics, less and less innovation. Now there are plenty of people working on internal development and release process, rules and guidelines, way too many of them are invented. There are redundencies, waste of resources, both by developing them and time spent to learn and adjust to thm. Every couple of years, it is definitely there is new internal tools and processes replacing old ones with no good reason. Now it is evident that to advance your career you need to go with managerial track, where senior technical people now spend time do adminitrative work. Also people good at political game get promoted fast. People can argue this is inevitable to a big company, but no one can argue this is a good thing to a techincal company.

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5.0
Jun 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- great culture - great work life balance - great coworkers

Cons

- feels too relaxed, no one takes the work super seriously - always comparing themselves to apple

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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