Microsoft Reviews

Pros

- Great attention to people management
- Work/life balance
- Career opportunities that come with large companies
- International opportunities

Cons

- Most of the career advancement opportunities are in Seattle, which may be an issue for some people
- Slower moving

Advice to Senior Management

Microsoft needs to become an innovator in order to be competitive and this is hard to happen with such a large organization.

Pros

Quite a proffesionally mananged organisation

Cons

Highly competitive environment in sales

Pros

Great and smart people that wants to do good. Great technologies to learn and resources for you to gather from.

Cons

No opportunities for Great and smart people that wants to do good. Cannot be your self and succeed here. Slow.

Advice to Senior Management

no advice because everyone is the same and have the same mentality. They hire the same types so that it can be like that

Pros

They have nice health benefits, especially if you have a spouse and kids. However, this will change in 2013 when they adopt a health program more similar to other companies. The days of the Cadillac Health Plan, while great, are sadly coming to a close. Outside of that, if you can thrive in the high stress and ultra-competetive work culture they foster and consistently hit the top of the annual performance review curve, the top 5-10% see some pretty great rewards.

Cons

However, if you are not in the top 5-10% of the annual performance review curve, the rewards are substantially different and less impressive. Depending on the organization, there can also be high levels of political gamesmanship and favor currying. Many teams drive too much to advertise and evangelize the work they are doing instead of actually doing the work, and unfortunately it works for now (but it won't always). The annual review system still fosters a predatory competetive culture versus a cooperative competetive culture. Senior management's philosophies on employees and employee retention have changed over the years as well. There used to be a strong belief in recovery, however that is not the case in the Windows organization today. As long as an employee produces and never needs any more-than-perfunctory maintenence, you will be fine. However, if more course correction than that is needed (and over a multi-year career, even super smart people occasionally need an assist here or there), the philosophy today seems to be to cut bait and just bring in another body. Microsoft always has said they invest in their people, however their actions more accurately reflected their words years ago than they do today.

Advice to Senior Management

It is a different company today than it was when it first started, and it needs different leadership to effectively run it moving forward. Ballmer is the old way of thinking when the place was small, full of pizza and caffeine-fueled 23 year old boys, and everybody had a realistic chance of making a big pile of money for all the stress and long hours. Today, those potential rewards are not there and there is more stress, more politics, more corporate bureaucracy, and less individual empowerment than at any other time in their history, and it really contaminates the culture and holds Microsoft back from being as great a place to work as it used to be.

Pros

Ton of opportunities to advance in professional expertise. Support to move around within the company. Excellent benefits, and good pay package

Cons

Limited coordination between product groups. Limited interaction with senior leadership. Very limited opportunities to look outside and implement best practices.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on cross-collaboration between product groups. Make compromises as necessary fo rthe sake of consistency of operations. Ask Ballmer to leave - his leadership hurts the company's image.

Pros

Benefits are quite good and generally well perceived when compared with other mai competitros in the area. Also, there are many smart and bright people who are striving to drive interesting projects across several areas of the company.

Cons

Heavy, too many silos, and quite beaurocratic. Generally very slow to move and tackle new opportunities. Complex matrix makes it very difficult to get opportunities to manage or lead end to end projets across businesses.

Pros

They treat you well and with respect no matter what

Cons

Growth and Promotion are a factor of where you are in the organization and not of your accomplishments or hardwork

Pros

Good work culture and a lot of smart people. Pay and benefits are good.

Cons

Company seems to lack direction. Difficult to do anything truely innovative.

Advice to Senior Management

Allow people to excel at what they are good at rather than focusing on improving what they are not.

Pros

The work is challenging, the people are incredibly intelligent and they take care of their employees in just about every way possible.

Cons

Way too many meetings, process and procedure can be burdensome and it's hard to change a lot of things that really don't make sense.

Advice to Senior Management

We're starting to do this already, but my advice would be to seek outside guidance and counsel on changing things up, operationally and otherwise.

Pros

Benefits
Ability to learn anything you want
Good Commuting perks

Cons

You still feel the need to compete against each other instead of working as a team due to the new review process.
Work life balance is hard to attain. You can have it but then you'll be penalized at review time.

Advice to Senior Management

The new review process needs re work. Is the same old with a new name.