Good to work for benefits or if you are passionate about MS products - Senior Lead Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Feb 18, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1) Benefits - good legal coverage, best in the business medical, dental and vision benefits, excellent benefits from Seattle area businesses (and other top US wide consumer businesses) 2) Pay: good pay, great stocks if you have been with MS when times were good, decent YOY increments 3) Lateral moves: easy to move across teams, lots of start up like teams and then there are SQL, Windows, Office teams etc. 4) Passion for MS products: if you are like me who grew up using MS products you'll love this place. However you need to know how to play the game.

Cons

1) Politics - too much top down mgmt, lack of clear directions, too much power stuggle, power centers in new / start up teams 2) Some teams are too fast paced - work/life imbalance, power centers, too fast w/o attention to long term sustainence 3) Being able to use your vacation - 1 yrs vacation gets accured however, depending on the team you are in, you may be working way too hard. It's about personal dicipline as much as the team's philosophy on work/life balance. Work smarter not harder else you'll get burnted out too soon and then the results will be disatisfying.

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5.0
Jun 30, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Love it you are surrounded with smart people and complex problem to solve

Cons

Lots of new features and roll outs happening hard to keep pace

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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