Bug fixing job, salary not that great - Software Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
Jul 16, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good for you CV. - You learn how to deal with software complexity and company complexity. - Decent benefits and stocks. - You can work from home.

Cons

- Work life balance is OK, but still not aligned with danish IT market. - The salary is a bit below with the standard IT danish market, but expectations are above. - Many people are "informally" required to be on 24/7 from time to time (including Christmas holidays, Easter, etc.), with a low extra pay. - There is a lot of legacy code, and a lot of code is bought from external comapnies, or it is outsourced and then integrated in the products, which makes the code base very hard to read and poorly written. - All the work going on is always secondary, where the main things are going on in the US or in other countries. This also means that Microsoft Copenhagen may not survive for a long time. - The engineering work is pretty much bug fixing and some small enhancements. There is little space for innovation, and innovating requires diving into the huge bureaucracy. - Software and people management is complex, so everything moves very slowly. - The company enforces a 6 month review where employees are evaluated by managers and coleagues. This is well known to generate a toxic competitive environment with a lot of hypocritical people. - Too many management changes. - High turnover rate, because of many people quitting and because of many firing. - The company mood, work life balance and benefits are gradually dropping. - People are not that smart. There are excellent people, but the average level is not that impressive. - People are maintenance-oriented instead of being engineering-oriented.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
Jun 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great benefits In federal, you can get a bonus for government clerances Good work culture Value based organization

Cons

lots of change lots of churn federal side does not align to commercial side work life balance is hard with "unlimited PTO"

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