Great policies, culture, learning oppurtunities and caring; poor non-tech managers without vision and insights - Software Development Engineer (SDE) Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Mar 22, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company is politically very matured, in terms of all details in policies, activities, learning resources, caring for people, etc Company cares people very much: strongly supports work/life balance, advocates 20% office hour in courses learning, provides top-level resources such as gyms, shuttles, snacks, campus environment etc Company is very famous and people are respected/admired by outsiders Company has a unique position "Program manager" which other companies don't have: it's a lowest level position same with SDE, but it strongly develops people's soft skills -- inter-personal skills, think bigger, manage teamwork, improve product life cycle, etc.-- a really great position to gain growth rapidly!

Cons

A myth here is, PM, Dev and Test are "3 pillars". In fact PMs are the most important one here -- they're half the leadership team. They're also under the most workload. Devs are the most cost effective -- least workload, mild-paced promotion. Tests are the most tedious and of the most workload, and least participated in strategic discussions in all. Being in such a monster company, no one has high efficiency -- sometimes >50% time is spent to handle ugly labor cases such as upgrade, side by side, security, backward compatibility, etc; many bugs on >10 year C/C++ codebase need to be fixed before being able to write in C#; huge external dependencies on other timezoned ares (typically Redmond) are painful, you have to mail them a question and get reply tomorrow, then you modify your question the day after -- typical global-scoped work is as slow as crazy. But the worst thing is the shabby manager level. As a 3/4 year old campus, most managers and leads are less than 3 year in microsoft, most of them are Chinese industry hires from companies not comparable to Microsoft; thus they share a common serious problem, lack of leading abilities and real insights. A bunch of mediocre leaders are ruining the great dreams of excellent 1-from-1000 engineers.

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5.0
Jun 5, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Learned a lot, plenty of team work opportunities

Cons

Internship could have been longer than 4 weeks

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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