Overall a great place to work - Software Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
May 22, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Getting to work with people who both know what they're doing and are on top of their game, as well as being fundamentally happy to help when they're reached out to, is a great experience. The scale is, as expected, massive. Working on products that will have an impact on millions of users is both challenging and rewarding.

Cons

With great scale comes great internal tooling and the stress of being responsible for maintaining production environments at such scale. You can find yourself being pigeonholed into a niche involving more internal systems, which break quite often, while gaining less experience that is more broadly relevant. For example, I coded quite a bit of front-end; however, I was using infrastructure components designed and implemented by other teams instead of the actual underlying framework (in my case, a combination of Angular and React).

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
Jul 2, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Comfortable and well paid. Very good work life balance

Cons

Too slow, couldn't grow. Growth depended on the team you are in. Can't leave team until SWE II

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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