Microsoft Reviews in Seattle, WA Area

Pros

Working at Microsoft will up your game like almost no other workplace.

You'll be working with industry luminaries and extraordinarily talented colleagues. Many of those that you'll work with LITERALLY wrote the book!

The products you create typically touch the lives of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world. What you work on (typically) matters - to you, to Microsoft and to the people who use your products.

Cons

Working at Microsoft can be challenging. Middle-management is hit and miss - some managers are fabulous. Many are ... well ... they're not best suited to be managers.

Microsoft's review process can be pretty brutal.

Advice to Senior Management

Be honest with your employees about the review process, distributions & the bell curve. Be honest about cutting heads that aren't a good fit for MS.

Pros

1. Access to resources 2. Availability of information 3. Agressive work environment

Cons

1. Depending on business bureaucracy can slow down growth.

Advice to Senior Management

Spend more resources on Innovation

Pros

Microsoft believes in its people and takes a clear stand on political issues relevant to its employees. The corporate philanthropy policies with matching gifts and volunteer time cash donations are exceptional and make me proud to work here.

Cons

Microsoft for years has been unable to shake its "uncool" reputation compared to Facebook, Google, and Apple. New synergies, visible in the metro UI standard being shared across products, is starting to bring the cool back to Microsoft.

Advice to Senior Management

Take advantage of strong Microsoft brands and beef up marketing efforts in order to stay competitive with Google and Apple.

Pros

Great Benefits and Flexible Scheduling. Plus, a lot of internal job opportunities and ability to move around. Little Chance of being laid off (Secure)

Cons

The comfortable lifestyle, great benefits and high margins reduces turnover and keeps employees there for a long time. As a result, you have limited upward mobility.

Pros

Good technologies, continue learning culture, very good benefits, flexible work hour, casual dress and atmosphere, beautiful Redmond campus, efficiency and automation in everything and processes, private or semi private office.

Cons

low starting salary, very low merit increase for software tester, under the water stock options, very small stock awards that take about 5 years until they are fully vested. small professional growth in term of climbing up the level (ladder). Some test leads were very bad.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't listen to the test leads all the time. Listen to the individual contributors too. Provide better annual salary increase to lower level of testers. Most testers probably receive between 1 and 2% annual increase of their based salaries.

Pros

- Incredibly smart, motivated, funny co-workers. I have learned a lot from the people around me.
- Ability to work on products that are used by millions/billions of people
- 2012 is looking like a huge year -- Windows 8, Windows Server 8, Windows Phone/Nokia Lumia 900, XBox, Kinect...
- Massive changes over past 2 years, putting sharper focus on engineering, developers
- Willing to admit mistakes and start over -- Windows Phone
- Marketing and advertising getting a lot better
- Great pay, great benefits, strong support for employees

Cons

- It's a big company, and it affects billions of customers, so there are some processes and rules that come with that. I can deal with that, but I know other people who get pretty frustrated. I have to say, the amount of BS rules and bureaucratic busywork feels way less in my world than it did 5 years ago.
- It can be a very fast-moving, aggressive culture. I can deal with that too, and I think you need that in our industry, but I know some people who didn't like it and didn't stick. Feels like we are doing better at combining the aggressive quick-decision culture you need in order to be nimble with a little bit of recognition that not everybody is wired that way and you need to listen to those people too and get the best out of them too.

Advice to Senior Management

- Stay the course -- we are starting to see all the investments over the past few years begin to pay off. Don't get distracted by short-term bright shiny objects. Don't do dumb things like buy Yahoo or RIM...

Pros

The benefits are among the best in the industry. They have excellent funds in their 401k offerings, they have insurance with no copay or paycheck deduction. They have legal benefits that are offered at a nominal fee, and free access to a top-notch gym and spa facility. They have health clinics throughout the year, free vaccines and discounts for anything from child care to restaurants all over Puget Sound.
Their cash bonuses and their stock bonuses are also amazingly generous. For a good performer, it pays to work at MSFT. It also has an amazing work-life balance. I got a 5-month maternity leave and do not work on Fridays. Facilities-wise, it is also top notch with the expected freebies for a techie company like kitchen goodies, subsidized cafeteria meals and the employee area known as "The Commons", which features a variety of retail dining options, convenience services (post office, bank, bike store, mobile stores, etc.), meeting spaces, and sports facilities—all situated in an urban-market atmosphere. Also, the shuttle service known as The Connector is one of the best ideas they've had. I don't ever drive to work!

I have worked in both small start-up companies and bigger high-tech companies and this is a great place to work. Since I am an industry hire with 12 years of experience, I have a very high compensation ratio for my level. I would have to be a Director of PM at Oracle, for example, to make the kind of salary I make now, especially after the across-the-board salary increase that took effect this past review year (August 2011).

Cons

As any big company with so many employees, products and organizations, every division is like a mini-company of its own. Your work life greatly varies depending on which organization you work at. I happened to be in different orgs in the same division and the learning experience, mentorship and career advancement I have accomplished in this group is a far cry from the previous group I belonged to. If you get a good lead and manager and you work hard, you are in for good life at MSFT. I don't see why I would ever want to work elsewhere. I am up for a promotion to Senior this review year and I expect to get it by working hard and smart. Sounds simple enough to me now, but it wasn't as clear cut in the previous group I was at.
Would Google give me more money? Perhaps, but I don't have to work 80 hours a week, I can take long vacations and have my Fridays off without being perceived like a slacker.

Advice to Senior Management

Mentor your ICs and accept your mistakes, then learn from them. Leave the arrogance behind and cut the pork. Consolidate your organizations and get rid of teams that are redundant. Listen to your customer! All orgs within the company should be more tightly integrated so the experience from an IC perspective isn't so vastly different from one team to the other.

Pros

Microsoft has great benefits -- we haven't paid a nickel in medical out of our own pocket in 10+ years.

Reasonable 401k matching.

I earn an excellent salary when all benefits, salary, and stock are taken into account.

I have had occasional opportunities to do excellent work -- but mostly my work is somewhat pedestrian and straightforward. You can make a difference here, but it's frequently hard to force a significant change in direction even when you know it's right.

you work around extremely intelligent and motivated people. Even the hobbies people pursue are done with excellence -- this is truly amazing.

MS has put a real premium on my personal growth -- working in such a large, intertwined environment has forced me to "grow up" in a variety of ways, and this has improved me both personally and professionally, and the company spends precious time each year helping me focus on this. Sometimes the training seems lame, but it always forces you to think about how to improve yourself. This might be my favorite result of working here.

Cons

No customer contact if you're a developer -- MS is just too big.

Development at MS is much more time-based than quality based. It's unfortunate, but that's probably the way I would do things if I were in charge anyway, as it makes good business sense. But it's frequently not very exciting.

MS doesn't seem to be a place you retire from. There is constant pressure to improve or leave -- and let's face it, we all have our limitations, we can't all be CEO. So you're eventually likely to be forced out in one way or another as you get older and get close to your potential. So while the constant improvement is great for you, it's only great to a point -- and then you start to have trouble changing jobs within the company as your reviews level out.

Advice to Senior Management

Dump Ballmer. Force the divisions to work together more effectively. We're starting to see some of this, but it's very slow to develop and it may be too late to develop the synergy we all know we're capable of.

Pros

Everyone I met over the age of 30 was happy to have an incredibly stable job at a company with excellent benefits and a lot of respect for their software engineers.

Cons

Everyone I met under the age of 30 didn't have anything against Microsoft but was restless and wanted to go do something else with their lives.

Advice to Senior Management

Nothing in particular, I loved my time there and if you're looking for that sort of stability I can't imagine a better place to code.

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.