Microsoft these days... - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
11 Mar 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1. Benefits. Benefits. Benefits. Including pay. 2. Flexible schedules in most groups. 3. Company reinventing itself - new CEO making huge difference, setting the right strategy 4. Due to transformation, many opportunities to move around internally, to make an impact 5. Really great people - smart, motivated, innovation-minded, fun 6. Access to so many resources from technology to information to hardware to collaborators 7. Stock is up! 8. Many group embrace Agile methodology for engineering.

Cons

1. Transformation creates chaos and that can make for a tough work environment in many groups. 2. Cross-company top talent mgmt and retention is a stated goal but there are no real processes or advocacy in place for this (talent retention decision making is at the group level with no visibility to other groups at MS needing the same talent, skills, roles filled). 3. Re-orgs are a regular occurrence where your role, manager, division, etc. can change overnight. 4. Tendency to change a product or feature too soon or wait too long to change it. 5. Still not enough weight or influence given to Customer-focused or UX positions & talent.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
5 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Learned a lot, plenty of team work opportunities

Cons

Internship could have been longer than 4 weeks

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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