Microsoft Program Manager II reviews

3.8

66% would recommend to a friend

(281 total reviews)
avatar

Satya Nadella

68% approve of CEO

63% positive business outlook

Program Manager II employees have rated Microsoft with 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 281 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Program Manager II professionals have a good working experience there. Microsoft is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Program Manager II professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

281 reviews
5.0
Aug 30, 2022

Great Career Starter

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Microsoft was so valuable in teaching me skills I could use to be an effective program manager at scale. Getting to interface with an external product with thousands of customers has been awesome and I've gotten to learn how to collaborate and create roadmaps with the technical writers, software engineers, and fellow PMs of my product. I also really loved getting to dive deep into customer telemetry and come up with data-driven decisions. Microsoft has a great infrastructure to do so. I was fortunate enough to be a PM right out of college in Azure Developer Division which focuses on Developer tooling. I think Microsoft set me up with the enterprise-level industry experience that has made me a competitive candidate out in the market. The people there are very intelligent and work hard within the bounds of a VERY healthy work life balance. People take plenty of vacation and days of throughout the year. I've loved the folks I've worked with for the most part and managers are awesome!

Cons

Salary compensation takes a big dip between years 3-6 which is when you see most folks at Microsoft leaving. I left close to year 4 to get my fair market price. Most people come back to Microsoft as a Senior PM or higher for work life balance and to chill. The majority of new hires have more than 7-10 years of experience. I noticed that I saw more Senior and Principal PMs than PM 2s towards the end of my career. Let that sink in. Microsoft is a Service provider. They care more about supporting more and more platforms and languages aka growing horizontally ("We need to support a Python on App Service, and Rust on App Service... and every other language and version!") than making what they have into a spectacular product. .NET releases and support takes up big chunks of dev time. Resources tend to get spread thin with so many things to support and less progress is made from a customer experience and feature set standpoint. The upper leadership moves very slowly and doesn't like taking risks. If you're a fast mover, you'll likely feel "slowed down" or "asked for further justification as to why it fits on the current roadmap" very often by upper leadership. If you're frustrated by this,

4.0
Aug 26, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There is a great company wide culture. Many smart and very experienced people.

Cons

But if you are not in one of the US offices, what you will get is based on luck. Many teams are great, some teams have a toxic culture, and there is little done to fix this usually until a lot of damage is done. Very few company events happen compared to other companies.

1.0
Aug 21, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Benefits - are amazing, they cater for everything non-work that you can think of - Stability - No matter what you know you're working for Microsoft

Cons

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and company to achieve more but it often doesn't practice that in reality. Employee growth is touted as a vitally important part of their corporate culture with various constructs and processes that seem to also encourage this. However, no matter the policies, procedures or training, my experience has been nothing but the opposite. In my time, i've witnessed ableism towards colleagues that had disabilities and even myself once I developed a disability that I partially contribute to my experiences. I've also heard stories of Racism and discrimination too. Managers, teams etc were always talking in secret, sabotaging each others projects. Referring to each other negatively. Playing political games to get things done and generally making my life miserable. Eventually, I started struggling in my position beyond the above issues. I developed anxiety, stress and depression. The heightened level of anxiety in everything at work lead to me dreading starting work. The pandemic actually helped, at least I didn't have to be physically in the same location as the people who were causing the issues. During this time, I developed stress caused epilepsy. Too much stress I get a seizure... yay My manager never helped with these issues despite me asking. My skip level booked some meetings with me but always left early and said they'd re-schedule. They never did. HR of course is a no-go, they're designed to protect the company and don't really care about you. I felt I had nowhere to turn to, with my mental health declining and my sense of self worth flying out the window I had to leave. I'm exceptionally disappointed Call me Neurodiverse or whatever you want

Viewing 25 - 27 of 281 Reviews

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