Really smart people in lots of meetings - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
Sep 17, 2008
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The health/med benefits are unmatched and the people I worked with were great. The employee discounts, the toys, the instant recognition (both good and bad) when you told people where you worked and the belief that you were, even indirectly, making the world better for the majority of end-users.

Cons

The schedule of meetings with no objective followed by post-mortem meetings with the same objective which resulted in the spawning of even more meetings with a similar agenda. The review/compensation model needed some tweaking . Don't negotiate level, negotiate salary. It was essentially better to come in under-leveled but at the pay you expected and out-perform expectations of you, resulting in a bigger performance bonus and a potential promotion which would then likely include a raise. Sadly, industry hires that came in appropriately leveled (salary commensurate with skills) would then be calibrated against everyone else at that level regardless of their tenure almost guaranteeing a less than stellar performance based on expectations of everyone at that level. To make matters more confounding, unless you're drawing negative attention you probably won't know you're not fully hitting expectations until review and then it's too late. Oh, and the parking

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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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