Great place to work and learn - Software Development Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Dec 2, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1. Great environment to work with lot of flexibility around working hours. 2. If you are in a right team you get chance to work on lot of new and cool stuff. 3. You can easily switch teams within Microsoft if you get bored with current work or team. You can work in different technologies.

Cons

1. Some MS products are in maintenance mode and if you are stuck in those teams there is not much to learn. 2. Management has lot of old guys with 20+ experience who are not adding much value to the company but are holding top posts. 3. Some products do not have clear future road map and they get shut down before reaching the customers.

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5.0
Jul 2, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Comfortable and well paid. Very good work life balance

Cons

Too slow, couldn't grow. Growth depended on the team you are in. Can't leave team until SWE II

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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