Very bad treatment of 'Temps', 'Vendors' - Analyst Microsoft Employee Review

1.0
12 Mar 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good work life balance. In a large bloated company anyone who doesn't wants to or cannot work finds place to hide. Flexible working hours, work from home allowed.

Cons

Very bad treatment of non-permanent employees. There are hundreds of such employees in Munich alone who do not give their opinions in any "Best Places to work" surveys. This is a new trick that companies employee to avoid responsibility of hiring a permanent employee and remain flexible with layoffs. The non-permanent staff are called just as 'Temps' or 'Vendors'. They have no rights, if a Manager is abusive towards them there is no protection for them except to leave the company. Temps are openly discriminated, in every email that is about any small benefits like buying company smartphone/tablet or purchasing softwares internally or going to off campus dinner, at the end of email is written "FTEs Only". Even it can happen, they would invite everybody to an all hands at an offsite and everybody books travel and just before the event, the "Temps" would be told, they are not allowed to go because of "budget constraints" or "policy issues". There have been people working as "Temps" like 8 or 10 years and layed off with a single sentence. Aside from non-permanent employees, the environment for FTEs is apparently very good but when it comes to promotions, only good at making connections to with the higher management get promoted. There are people at very high positions like who dont even have a University degree, they are there because they know how to be friends with important people.

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5.0
12 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great benefits In federal, you can get a bonus for government clerances Good work culture Value based organization

Cons

lots of change lots of churn federal side does not align to commercial side work life balance is hard with "unlimited PTO"

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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