Nine years, and I've never been more excited to work here... - Senior Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
Sep 11, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

After spending nine years of my career at Microsoft, I can say without doubt that the one thing that's kept me here, is people. Building products, and solving problems for a billion people, attracts some of the brightest minds. It can be intimidating, but is almost always also exciting. Creativity and innovation is always encouraged and rewarded. Role boundaries are as flexible as you want them to be. I work with rock-star devs who live and breath hyper-scale code. Whereas I often operate in the fuzz between full stack engineering, program management, and marketing. Benefits are pretty good, once you get past the unnecessary complexity of the way they are structured. Management knows things are different now. This is not the same Microsoft as two years ago. You can almost smell the change in campus air. Speaking of smells, management's finally listening and the cafeteria food has been excellent lately.

Cons

An excellent engineer doesn't necessarily make a good manager. This is a lesson that has eluded Microsoft for decades. I've seen many rock-stars in the making walk out because of used-to-be-engineer managers who haven't quite been able to let go. That said, there are plenty of excellent managers here. When you find one, stick with her/him.

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".

2374
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All