Love the "evil empire", which is much better and fun than than Google's "do no evil". - Anonymous employee Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
3 Jun 2008
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

It's a great and dynamic environment, with flexible work hours, and a very young and vibrant team. We are like a start-up, we work hard, party hard, and overall have a great time at work and outside of it. People are from all backgrouns, they have bachelor's degrees, masters degrees, and come from various parts of the world! People respect each other, they support each other, and you can always count on your friends, and turn to anyone for help. You'll never hear no as an answer. Microsoft is a fantastic place to work, and I highly recommend it! Come and join us.

Cons

The salary, while competitive isn't as high in some cases as in other companies. You have to wait a long time to receive benefits such as stock options and other rewards. The company invests in you, but you have to wait and invest your time and career to actually see the reward. Bonuses are usually quite low, and stock awards take years to divest, so you only see part of the money immediately. For other awards, you'll have to wait for several years, before being able to use it. The last thing is tenure, seems like that's important and is able to get you promoted faster than newbies.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
5 Jun 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
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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