“Financial safety”, in exchange for strange backroom politics, unrealistic senior “expectations” and tiny bonuses. - Senior User Experience Designer Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
16 Oct 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice people. Steady paycheck. Great medical benefits.

Cons

- The amount of time spent in Powerpoint is egregious. STOP wasting so much time “telling the story” and build some freakin’ customer centric features. - Program management is not product management. They literally don’t have the modern product skill set. They have a project management/timeline based skill set and therefore, it needs to be handed over to UX immediately. - Engineering has little accountability. Once a year, on every team, it becomes clear that engineering is taking their sweet time and using technical obfuscation (everyone else’s lack of tech stack knowledge) to buy more time. - Engineering has WAY too much input on experiences which they have no expertise in. I can’t tell you how many devs I have had to “convince” to do the right thing for customers. I appreciate collaboration, but devs are in a role to help execute the strategies of UX and product management, they don’t need to have input into the strategy, just the tech efficiencies within it...because you aren’t qualified or empathetic enough to do so. - Once you become a senior, suddenly just being great at your job is not good enough and in order to receive any small portion of your already peanut sized bonuses, you will be expected to go “above & beyond” your role and will be viewed as an under performer if you don’t. It’s insane that a 100k person company would expect anyone to stand-out. It is a waste of time, just reward people for doing their jobs well and leave people alone.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

4.0
28 Jan 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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