Excellent place to work and have a brilliant career - Software Development Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
Jun 30, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good pay, outstanding benefits, incredily smart people, and leading edge software technology and processes. I know some parts of Microsoft have their own ecosystems and processes which can be considered old school, but there's many facets of the company that are ran like a start-up where managements job is to just remove road blocks and let the dev/test/pm chain innovate. The company is so huge there are opportunities to work on whatever you want. Employee training is top notch, and you are free to change your career path as you want. The work life balance is very good, and the review process is mostly fair and honest. I haven't had any problems with politics, but that doesn't mean the system is perfect. Compared to the other big popular software houses (i.e. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple), I feel that Microsoft is probably the best company to stick with and have a brilliant career. Many people I work with came from Google and Amazon and are much happier with Microsoft.

Cons

The company is huge and it's not uniformly ran. Make sure you understand the dynamics and culture of the team you're thinking of working with. It can either be a horrible experience of an awesome one. Good news is if you're not happy, there's plenty of other divisions and groups to work for. Another con is Microsoft is famous for its BGHS (Big Giant Head Syndrome). Meetings are always rat-hole'd by smarty pants that feel it's important to argue and debate details to the point that you'll be lucky to get through 2-3 slides of your presentation. Some people are difficult to work with because they are very extroverted and opinionated. Having strong communication skills is paramount to surviving here.

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5.0
Jun 11, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazing work culture and work life balance

Cons

A little slow over all

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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