Lots of opportunity, interesting projects, smart, motivated people - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Sep 25, 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

One of the best things about Microsoft is that you are working with smart, motivated people all the time. You will find great challenges and be inspired by your peers on a daily basis. I'm always growing and learning. This can be untrue in certain teams, but in general I've found this to be true for most of the teams I've worked with. Loads of opportunity to try new things. I've worked on many different products and gained experience in multiple roles. You can truly change your career while staying in the comfort of the same company.

Cons

Politics becomes a part of your everyday pretty quickly as you move up in the company. There is a lot of overhead to get sign off on changes and move forward with something new. They want to be agile, but this is the biggest obstacle in actually being good at it. There is a lot of pressure for moving up. This is a good thing in a lot of respects, but can be stressful if you find yourself on a competitive team where moving up is difficult, or if you want to coast for a while career wise and focus on other aspects of life. It's not the place you can just do good work and not worry about promotions. If you're not moving up, you are eventually moving out.

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5.0
Jun 26, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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Cons

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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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