A great place to end up working, after you've had your fill of startups - Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
May 25, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Reasonable work hours ("crunch" weeks are far and few between), excellent benefits (all-inclusive - no copayments even required), regional pay adjustments for cost-of-living differences (Bay Area pay was 15% higher than "standard" salaries for comparable job levels when I first joined). I've also had very good experiences with being rewarded for doing good work, in the form of stock awards, cash bonuses, and time off. Products being developed are very diverse, so there's a great opportunity to move between different technologies, markets, and even project scales (hundred-man projects down to teams of just a handful of people). The company is very stable (having been around a while).

Cons

Big company mentality - it often feels like there isn't much innovation going on, and sometimes it seems like the cards are stacked against trying to do something too new or creative. It's also a bit frustrating at times to be under the restraints of all of the antitrust suits which have been going on - cross product integration is very tightly examined to ensure there will be no legal ramnifications, down to one case where a partner team couldn't explain the format of data they were consuming to our team, because doing so would require them to document/explain it to the general public.

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5.0
Jun 5, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Learned a lot, plenty of team work opportunities

Cons

Internship could have been longer than 4 weeks

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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