Massive Discrimination - Software Development Engineer III Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
27 Jun 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay was overall decent and project were generally interesting. Some people were very nice and I had members of my team volunteer to go to HR to protest my treatment by management.

Cons

I am female and hearing impaired, and faced discrimination on both levels. I also witnessed racial discrimination. When I pointed out an architectural flaw in the system, I was called a drama queen and ignored, until the system self-imploded from said flaw a few months later (of course I got no credit from pointing it out). I was never invited to team events and was blatantly told it was because I was a girl by other team members. I was the only female engineer on the team. My manager though topics like strippers was perfectly OK work conversation. As for hearing loss discrimination, it got progressively worse over time. People joked about me to "not tell me to do something, I'd just hear it wrong." This grew to being told not to talk in meetings, not being invited to meetings, and being told not to answer anything verbally - the only thing I was told I was allowed to verbally say is "I'll get back to you with that" and answer via e-mail. I was also told I was only allowed to answer e-mails in one or two sentences. Then all project ownership was taken away from me and given to someone else so they could "manage my communication." I wear hearing aids and can lip read. All I needed was people to face me and talk one at a time, but they refused to do that and cut me out instead. I was told that as long as my "verbal communication problems" persisted, I would never be promoted again. The only non-white member of my team had his computer hacked into by our mutual manager so the manager could send e-mails out from that person's computer when that person wasn't there, and effectively managed to destroy his e-mail credibility to the point where when the guy sent out an "I quit!" e-mail, no one at first believed him. Then the manager joked with someone else that I hadn't acted up enough for him to do that to me yet. I complained to HR about the whole incident, but nothing happened. Those involved got away with everything, and are still at the company. HR said they saw no problems with any of this behavior.

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5.0
12 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great benefits In federal, you can get a bonus for government clerances Good work culture Value based organization

Cons

lots of change lots of churn federal side does not align to commercial side work life balance is hard with "unlimited PTO"

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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