Excellent Benefits, no job stability - Business Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
May 7, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The benefits were incredible. Microsoft covered premiums for medical/dental/vision. They gave thousands in an HSA card. They matched 50% of 401k contributions up to the IRS limits. All told, probably 30k worth of benefits. The work was interesting, at least at first. Not too much micromanaging. Excellent severance package.

Cons

No job stability. Seemingly at random, groups would get laid off. Might be 10 people this week from a neighboring department. Might be 2000 people next week. My group lasted pretty long, all things considered. Doesn't matter how well your team does, how many projects you complete, your team may be laid off with no warning. I'm marking DEI as 1 star not due to any personal bad experiences, but rather because they laid off the entire DEI team, so I anticipate things getting worse. More and more of the work is focused on the AI projects, even when the results of those projects are less than impressive.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
Jun 30, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Love it you are surrounded with smart people and complex problem to solve

Cons

Lots of new features and roll outs happening hard to keep pace

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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