Microsoft Software Development Enginner-|| reviews

4.1

74% would recommend to a friend

(819 total reviews)
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Satya Nadella

57% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Software Development Enginner || employees have rated Microsoft with 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 819 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Enginner || professionals have an excellent working experience there. Microsoft is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Enginner || professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

819 reviews
5.0
Nov 6, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Most of the people here are really smart. There's so much going on at the company and they've been at this forever - Microsoft knows how to ship a product. The volume of information (and professional development resources) available to employees is enormous. If you want to work on products the entire world uses, look no further. Compensation and benefits are both very good. There's a lot of emphasis put on individual career development. In terms of social responsibility, they're very generous and proactive re: corporate giving and volunteer work.

Cons

There can be a lot of red tape. Sometimes you can get the feeling that you're spending more time talking about what is going to be done than actually doing it. This is both good and bad: your plan is always rock solid but because of all the time spent planning you have less time for the work itself. Depending on the team there can be pressure to "just get the job done" whether or not that means working reasonable hours. In my experience this is cyclical. There can also be politics to deal with since, after all, this is a big company. There can be reluctance to embrace non-Microsoft technologies, particularly open source ones. Some of this is valid from a legal perspective (Microsoft is a big target and can get away with a lot less than a smaller company which is off the radar) but regardless of the actual reasons this can make it take longer to get the job done.

2.0
Oct 3, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There's a lot of really smart people, this is the main reason I joined the company.

Cons

Bad development processes. The only people who think we're cutting edge are those who never worked elsewhere or don't write code in their spare time and been exposed to alternatives. It doesn't take tons of developers to deliver great software. Software is one of the rare industries where it's possible to grow through productivity gain rather than headcount expansion. Microsoft is dominated by conservative people. There are so many innovative ideas around here, and yet very few of them ever make it into a product, and the truly innovative products languish. The priority is to lock in existing customers instead of winning new ones. Hence backward compatibility takes precedence over innovation. My feeling is that if your group name doesn't have "research" or "labs" in the title, it's probably not worth working for.

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