Horrible, toxic and overly political - Senior Human Resources Manager Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
Feb 15, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great benefits and salary Tasty subsidized food at almost every cafe on campus Excellent for employees with children ( most managers are super flexible on work schedule) Incredibly intelligent business leaders-(specifically within engineering)

Cons

I don't even know where to begin. As a seasoned HR professional, I am appalled at the bait and switch strategy that was used to get me to join Microsoft. I have over 7 years of strategic HR Management experience within the tech space and left an amazing company/team/boss to make one of the worst decisions of my life. I was told coming in that I would supposedly be doing "big" things, but I quickly realized that I was just another cog in a big wheel. I spent the majority of my time (90 percent) writing emails to people about what I might do to get buy-in and permission rather than spending time actually executing. Overall, the organization is filled with gossipy, rest and vest types. I also witnessed a very bright young African American female employee verbally abused and viciously bullied by her manager while senior leaders turned a blind eye. For all of you out there, I would think long and hard before joining the HR function at Microsoft. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

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5.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

great to work with collaborative team

Cons

large company so there's a lot of overlap between team strengths

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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