There are some good orgs and some not so good orgs - Software Development Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Jan 17, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Most people are passionate to create good products and good experiences for the customer -Lots of different job opportunities. There are hundreds of teams in Microsoft. You can work on anything from games, to main stream products, to hardware, to research projects. I had jobs in many different groups over my years there because I decided I wanted to try a new product. Also, you can change disciplines. I've seen many people want to change disciplines and they started getting experience in there current group and either took over the role in there current group or moved to a new group. -The clique of there are lots of smart people there, and there are.

Cons

-Plans can change on an upper management whim. There's no good reason other then someone way up the food chain had a pet idea they wanted in the product. -Upper management expects everyone under them to provide schedules and such but they don't feel they should be held accountable to a schedule and we wait with no idea when the decisions that have major impact on our product will be made. -Schedules get made that everyone knows can't be made but will only report that as the official schedule until it's blown.

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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