Great if you're lucky to work at MS. Terrible if MS is lucky to have you. - Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
19 Oct 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Work life balance is respected, so you have time to develop yourself outside of work - Compensation and benefits are generous - It's a family friendly company if you're at that stage in your life and want to slow down - The company is financially stable ( for now )

Cons

- The ratio of PMs to engineers is ridiculous. There are only a handful of engineers for every PM in my org. Our backlog keeps growing, while the features with the best "visibility" and the least amount of investments gets resourced. - Many of the PMs are non-technical. They've landed this job due to dumb luck, then wonder why the over-worked engineers can't get this done faster. When work items take longer than expected, IC PMs are pressed to ask them to "work faster". - The more talented people at the company leave. Those who stay are the ones who can't get jobs with similar pay elsewhere. Those who stay and take on work with great "visibility" great promoted. This means that product planning tends to be short sited. Seniors only want to work on something they can get done before the next review period. - It's getting more difficult to recruit. PMs are joining in increasing numbers from non-technical domains. They may have domain knowledge in the space, but they're not engineers. This is going to exasperate the problems I mentioned above. - Upper management is very disconnected from the reality of building software in the modern age. Most of them haven't touched code in decades, or have been around since the early days of the Internet. They think we are a first-class engineering company, yet we don't have real time metrics, continuous deployment, technical debt controls, testing... - Not agile, despite at the rhetoric. - We're so much on building a culture around everything except having a great software engineering team.

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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