Generous with salary but your skills will suffer long term - Senior Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Sep 13, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very good salaries and benefits You will work with incredibly smart people

Cons

Reluctance to truly embrace open source tools for development really hurts developer skill sets. For example, instead of moving to tools like Spark, MSFT builds it's own tools. Most of their own internal development doesn't even use products they sell externally, like Azure. The proprietary tools they use will severely hurt you when you are looking for your next job. The company is huge part 1. The scope of what you will work on will most likely be small features on existing products. This might be OK from a pure C++ coding perspective but it won't allow you to get architecture development experience, learn new tools or if you want to do something innovative with new technologies. The company is huge part 2. It's difficult to stand out when there are hundreds of really good engineers in a division. There are few engineering management roles now, most were eliminated. Culture can be somewhat forced. Small companies usually have a better culture. Office has implemented a "Shared Engineering" model. Software Engineers are supposed to write product code, test and develop the resulting data streams. Realistically you will find few people that can or want to do all three well.

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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