Your experience at Microsoft is dependent on your team and what you make of it - Software Development Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
25 Oct 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I had a really good team. The people I worked with were very talented (and in some cases borderline genius) and opinionated (in a good way). It's a great place to start your career and you will learn a lot (both good and bad). It's also such a huge company so you can change teams internally and do something very different. And pretty much you will find all sorts of people in the company. For every employee that you think is unworthy, you'll find 10 others who make it great. And the compensation and benefits are basically second to none (even with the changes to the health care plans). Work life balance is so much better at MS than at a startup.

Cons

Being a huge company some bad apples somehow find its way though and they coast along despite the horrid stack ranking policy (another con). And dealing with them is tough unless you have a great manager. Culture wise, I found that a lot of people tend to "drink the kool-aid" as it were. They don't want to try competitor's product and will love everything MS puts out. Which can get irritating when you're trying to point out a valid flaw (or explain why a lot of customers may not like a feature) and explain why it should be fixed.

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4.0
28 Jan 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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