Great place to work minus the layoffs - Software Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Feb 2, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- No RTO mandate. Many employees work full time remote - Unlimited PTO that's taken generously - Healthy WLB - Relaxed policy on contributing to open source projects or working on side projects - Relatively bottom up. If you have an idea you're encouraged to build it and see if it works. - Great campus with regular events and lots of things to do - Health insurance is great

Cons

- Layoffs. There's been regular layoffs since 2022. - The additional stock given each year is not as much as the FAANG companies. After 4 years your total compensation goes down because your yearly stock refreshes won't keep up with your initial stock grant.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

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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