Great people, good work life balance, good products. - Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) II Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Jul 25, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Most of the people are smart, hardworking and fun. Very passionate about what they do. I've always had pretty good work/life balance, with only occasional long weekends and late nights. The products have global impact, which can be exciting. Very good pay, health coverage, and other benefits.

Cons

Sometimes a lot of bureaucracy, the normal sort you expect from a big company. Frequent re-orgs waste almost a month every year... or more. Slow promotion process to get to a Lead or Manager position. In *years* there, I've only seen a few people leave lead positions, and only a couple people move into lead positions from the individual contributor ranks. Review process is not fun. There's a lot of competition and it's a forced bell curve. I spend a large portion of my time working to distinguish myself and grab projects from others so that I could get into the top 30% bracket... otherwise, you might get randomly laid off if the company is going through a re-org. Sometimes a whole team might get low review scores, just because another team was deemed more important. (Supposedly they dumped the review ratings, but they still rate you and use that to determine your bonus and promotions. And the bonus is still on a forced curve. Now they just don't tell you the score, but you can still figure it out based on the bonus percentage you get.) Also, the SDE vs SDET thing is not the best, however, it should be improving. In the past SDE could dump garbage over the fence and SDET had to test, find bugs, help with fixes, and then get in trouble for slowing down the feature RI, or shipping date. The company is trying to put more responsibility on the SDE's for code quality, and if they succeed, then great! But I'll believe it when I see it.

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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