Excellent employer on the whole - Software Development Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
Feb 24, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you are fresh out of college, this is one of the best companies to work for. Like many other tech companies, there's a big emphasis on work-life balance and community building. In a lot of ways, it will feel like an extension of college in terms of the learning and events with other young professionals. Senior developers are, for the most part, very happy to mentor younger people and instill a sense of discipline. Internal mobility is fantastic as well, moving from team to team is relatively frictionless and it's Microsoft, so there's a team for almost any area you want to work in. There are so many resources that there's an expert for basically anything you want to know. There's tons of young professionals around too and Seattle is a great place to live. Pay is competitive with the other top companies at a junior level. Exit opportunities are great here as well. If you pay attention and put effort into your work, you will come out with a brand name that recruiters all over want to see, as well as a disciplined, rigorous skill set to match.

Cons

As you move up in ranks, the pay disparity between Microsoft and its competitors (Google, Amazon, Facebook) starts to grow, with Microsoft developers making substantially less than their counterparts. For some, this is okay if they value lifestyle more than career progression. For others, it's common to jump ship to another company. As with any other big company, there's layers and layers of bureaucracy. For most mature teams, all work will be carefully planned months in advance, specced, discussed in multiple team meetings, with dedicated PMs and testers. In the beginning this is good because it teaches the absolute best, gold standard way to develop large software. After a while, it can become very dull and repetitive though. The annual review system, which invariably involves peer feedback and encourages backstabbing peers, can be maddening. Even after spending several years here, most people will find it's hard to break off of the railroaded promotion system and really shine as a superstar, just due to the seniority-based culture and siloed nature of the work (you don't have the expertise to move into a management role or more technical area that's already being done by someone more senior, but by never doing that role you'll never build expertise). Also your experience is hugely, hugely team dependent. Local team culture matters way more than anything that happens at top management level. Two employees at two different teams can have drastically different lives. Maybe the things I list as pros are actually cons in your team, and vice versa. Unfortunately there's no real way to tell what it'll be like working on a team until you actually start working there. You can gauge the number of young vs old developers to get a sense of the culture though. Despite this Microsoft is still a fantastic company, no regrets after having worked here for 6 years. The opportunity to work alongside world-class engineers to ship code that all modern versions of Windows use has been a privilege.

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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".

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