Great Company to start working at! - Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
Jul 14, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great international team, very interesting people among industry, seasonal trips to Redmond/US or to European countries as a part of learnings/conferences participation, good salary, great benefits, a realistic way to become promoted, support from management, big willingness from management to get people grow at company not leave. At Microsoft Russia, you spend your time not just in a hard work but in a work where you love it, it is very common situation that people start working by reading/answering to email on Sunday evening, and even in vacations you still remember of your job and very want to get back to it :)

Cons

as in all situations when you love your work, work/life balance is something that needs to be changed :) Microsoft makes it a big challenge for people - you will want to work each day regardless it is a work or weekend day. As sub is growing each year, not all managers are yet enough experienced to lead teams with different people, so there is a good need to get them more experienced. Good thing to say, Senior Management is taking care of that, and it worries in order to help young managers to better understand needs of their teams and help them both to grow together and build the common success.

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5.0
Jun 22, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- excellent benefits - invests in long term of employees - not in forefront of tech but has always been a good follower - company reinvents itself. - established engineering processes - promotes career mobility within

Cons

- not the topmost in salary and compensation - work is not fast paced. Can get boring for those who like start up culture - some teams are full of team members who have worked in the same team and product for decades. Lacks innovation - company going through a lot of changes as they reinvent in the era of AI

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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