Geeks are being replaced by the "country club crowd" at an alarming rate. - Senior Consultant Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Sep 4, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you happen to be deemed a "rock star" for any particular year, the bonus compensation will be very nice indeed. Benefits are definitley nice if you have a family. Everybody in the world has heard of Microsoft, which can work for you (and against you as well). Company events are usually pretty good - I particularly enjoyed TechReady every year. Great place to learn about other Microsoft products that you may not have any prior experience with - lots of internal resources to leverage when you want to explore something new. Lots of smart co-workers - as long as you're not management, you can almost guarantee that your peers won't be idiots.

Cons

Extremely likely that the quality of your work will have exactly zero impact on how you are perceived (and rewarded) by management. It's really just a popularity contest, and there aren't any checks and balances on this process. You could be the smartest guy on the planet, delivering the most amazing solutions, generating nothing but love from your customers, but if you didn't happen to work with your practice manager at his previous company, or don't golf with him, etc - you can probably forget about recognition. Seriously, this isn't sour grapes here (I was actually pretty well rewarded), but the VAST majority of smart, hard-working people are ignored at best, and taken advantage of at worst.

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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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