Great people, going through lots of change - Solution Specialist Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
15 Oct 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are some amazingly talented people at Microsoft and working with them is a pleasure. The sales environment is getting more high-pressure, but still nothing like what you hear from other places. They froze S-plan (sales people) base salaries and upped OTE by 8%, I believe, but the quotas are getting staggering. Everyone on my team has a quota over $10M. You can make a comfortable living and have good work-life balance.

Cons

A lot of transition means searching for answers. First it was Software + Services, now its Cloud First, Mobile First. There is a huge push to begin LOB selling, but unfortunately Microsoft doesn't sell much in the way of business solutions, it sells plumbing, so actually figuring out what to do is a struggle sometimes. Quotas go up but customers remain the same, so its squeezing existing customer bases for money. Audits are up and customers are not happy. High quotas mean its tough to be too much over 100%, so payouts are limited. Microsoft is increasingly left behind - going into a customer to talk about Windows 8 Apps and Windows Phones while everyone has an iPhone and an iPad just underscore how out of touch Microsoft got and quickly it was passed by.

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5.0
26 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

benefit and wlb are good

Cons

a lot of layoffs lately

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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