Microsoft Reviews in San Francisco, CA Area

Pros

Many opportunities to learn and benefits

Cons

Experiencing turmoil of being directionless

Advice to Senior Management

No advice to hunchos

Pros

Fabulous information infrastructure and a culture of sharing it. Plenty of businesses for lateral movement. Structured management development process and tools.

Cons

Processes get created sometimes for the sake of having processes. Far too much internal focus during the planning cycle, losing sight of why we're in business.

Advice to Senior Management

Hold executives as accountable for performance (or lack thereof) as you do individuals. Do a better job of extracting value from acquisitions. And learn to take the long view, not just the quarterly view. Tendency to "manage by line of sight" rather than using their own tools to create trully virtual teams.

Pros

Salary and bonuses were very good.
Fairly well defined path for career development and advancement.
Some very smart people.

Cons

Some lack of corporate and management vision.
Poor communication of company priorities and strategies.
Individual initiatives and effort often seem to get no attention beyond immediate line management.

Advice to Senior Management

Fix internal company communication mechanisms.
The need to satisfy short term goals can stifle individual initiative and effort.
Significantly increase the ratio of technical to HR communications.

Pros

Great Benefits
Cross team mobility - there are so many products that you can work on

Cons

Vision needs to improve and deliver fast

Pros

They're established; some still see it as a good thing to have on your resume. Customers will answer your calls, though they arent often happy with your products.

Cons

The platform is way too big; company is slow to drive to current trends in the industry. Languishing in critical spaces like mobility.

Advice to Senior Management

Find your entrepeneurial spirit; your employees are frustrated as they are of the mindset that they now work for the newest IBM.

Pros

Cool products - everyone knows of Microsoft! Innovation - new products and services are constantantly being released to consumers and enterprises.

Cons

Large comany syndrome - you can get swept aside unless you constantly manage your networks and keep an eye on the horizon for your next one or two career steps. That said - that's a good problem to have. It keeps you sharp!

Pros

Great work/life balance, excellent benefits. Great place if you're not too motivated or ambitious. Everyone gets an office.

Cons

Its a very painful place to innovate or try to push product thinking beyond reactionary "What does Google do?" thinking. Entirely too much focus put on "alignment" between products results in "paint by numbers" designs. Very business/engineering focused, which means we ship technical innovations that are nearly worthless to everyday users. The place bleeds talent from every pour, but the culture keeps the best thinking in check - while the loudest, most senior bullies push their personal opinions into product designs. MSFT says its results-driven, but there isn't any accountability when the loud-mouths in management get it wrong. A product planning process that takes almost as long as the work to build it? Waterfall doesn't even begin to describe how slowly MSFT moves.

Advice to Senior Management

The company is too big, the products lack meaningful innovation and you only seem to react to innovation by competition with meaningless, watered-down half efforts. Simplify the business and the products will follow. Let the people who know how to ship great products lead the product design process. Your systems for employee evaluation and reward are a caustic, mish-mash of divisive "me first" incentives, unintended consequences and an epic time waster that doesn't work for promoting the best talent and thinkers.

Pros

The health benefits package is fantastic.

If you want to be a lifer somewhere, it's a good place.

Cons

Management doesn't have a clue what they're doing. Throwing darts at the wall.

Anyone with desire & drive is shut down if they don't conform to a PM's view.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your engineers!

Pros

Good reputation and it's easy to get into the accounts. It can be challenging with consumers.

Cons

The company has a complex compensation system besides the revenue they measure on numerous scorecard that vary quarterly. Most of these make no sense and people work the system to achieve them.

The job and career opportunities are limited.

Advice to Senior Management

Bring the company to the new world and stop focusing on the past. Move with cloud and focus on consumers.

Pros

Benefits were great at Microsoft.
Work and life balance was stressed from the top level down.
Many opportunities to make yourself heard.

Cons

Administrative opportunities are very limited if you do not work at the Redmond campus. It was very hard to move up career wise in the administrative community there.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to consider more effective ways in retaining long time employees instead of just treating them as replaceable with the next person.