Great company, but a lot depends on the team - Senior Software Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Jul 16, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great company to work for, reasonable pay, good benefits and social package, great incentives for long term (stocks). Lot's of opportunities if you can relocate to US.

Cons

It really depends a lot on the team. Below remarks relate to my last team in London. The team I worked for was really very chaotic, no long term vision or planning, the product managers' engagement was very little. Very little concern for design or architecture considerations. Contradictory goals for different teams working on the same product. Little regard for testing or quality. No team work culture whatsoever. This results from the remuneration and incentive rules and the management style. People pressed for individual success, scorecards, few people care about product design, maintainability, extendibility or for the product quality. Illusion of work-life balance. Despite claiming the company cares for it, there is a huge pressure for feature work, and if you take into account lack of design, teamwork, poor testing, etc, this is paid for with private long hours developers need to spend at the office to compensate. I am truly sorry, to say all this, as I think this is a great company to work for. Nonetheless, a lot depends on the manager, their individual goals or aspirations, the work culture they promote. It's simply down to the team you end up with. I wasn't lucky with my last team, I guess.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

4.0
Jan 28, 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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