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Microsoft Reviews
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Nov 18, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
1.0
Communication
3.0
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
2.0
Recognition & Feedback
1.5
Senior Leadership
3.0
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
1.5
8 of 10 people found this helpful
Pros
If you are out of college, Microsoft may be a good place to bootstrap. Although you may share an office, it has excellent facilities, besides a great benefits package.
Cons
Experience very specific to the Microsoft world, which is not very much applicable to other environments and companies. Company is slow to react to the market and to correct issues, especially with bad hiring decisions. If you are a rock star and does perform well above the average, you will still be hindered by politics and promotion policies to get to the place you should be. Prior work experience is usually not taken into account and you must be willing to start from the beginning again.
Advice to Senior Management
Try to retain the best talent. In particular, don't lose good people to other companies if there are groups willing to hire them. Learn how to recognize people that effectively brings values to the company and don't be so closed minded thinking Microsoft is the best place to work.
Nov 18, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
1.0
Communication
1.0
Compensation & Benefits
1.0
Employee Morale
1.0
Recognition & Feedback
1.0
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
1.0
Fairness & Respect
1.0
7 of 8 people found this helpful
Pros
Love the healthecare insurance, ride share, health club, legal, and other perks such as reimbursement offered for those really late nights on campus that last beyond public transportation. I have had to take a cab home a couple of times at 2:00am and was reimbursed 100%. I also like the speaker series that are very educational. There are eduacational reimbursment benefits as well but overal they are pretty light at 7K a year I think for an approved program at a local university and not sure how far 7K would go at the university of washington but it is something.
Cons
The secret society that exists between those that have been at Microsoft the longest. It is a tough click to crack. There is no clear roadmap to parnter and I honestly do not know of anyone from the outside that makes it from entry level now days to partner. There are far too many people in line that have been at microsoft forever what are waiting for those spots. And, the comp model does not promote teamwork. Instead it promotes hundereds of redundant teams, roles, and products all competing against eachother to the finish line. There is little rationalle behind who wins. It is a subjective process that looks objecive on paper but often the paper reviews actually do not match the true work that is delivered. Those who are new to the culture or are from the outside really get taken advantage of by the old timers. They speak two different languages and the old timers expect you to adapt or leave and sometimes adapting to their ways lacks business ethics.
I personally have been asked on more than one occassion to do things like "fudge the numbers, make it up, etc" and when refused to do so diplomatically and carefully was then demoted and given a poor perforamnce reveiw despite winning several awards throughout the year that were an obvious contrast to what was in my review. One of the awards in fact was for Engineering Excellence for what of the best projects of the year awarded by Bill Gates so it was intersting to receive my fourth award that year and then on my review be told that I was in the bottom 10%. Previously to that year under other managers, I was always in the top 10% and on steve's "One to Watch List." Yup, there is a list - I'll bet a lot of you softy's did not know that.
Things like this though happen all the time, you hear it everywhere and things never seem to change. Worse for wear thought is that if you take something like this to HR, they really have not ability to do anything except for an investigation that can make the indivudal emploee look bad, the repercussions cintinue against the employee and HR and the GM's with poor ethics continue on.
In the end, I will leave due to the poor business ethics I have seen here as that is the beginning of the end for microsft when at this size and scale they have lost complete control og the emplyees, sr managers, and HR.
Advice to Senior Management
I'll be looking at you through the other side of the google glass but will not ask the technology gods to give you mercy as you do not deserve it.
Nov 26, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.0
Communication
1.5
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
1.5
Recognition & Feedback
2.5
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
1.0
Fairness & Respect
3.0
5 of 5 people found this helpful
Pros
Great medical and vision benefits, reasonable dental ones. Mature, stable company with relatively good payment. Relatively flexible working hours.
Cons
Career growth is limited, once you enter the company. Minor promotions happen on annual basis. If you enter the company in lower level, you have no chance of moving up, regardless of performance.
Work-life balance does not exist in many teams. The company sets unreasonable expectation for responsiveness, causing employees to reply to e-mails across the clock.
Directions are not set clearly and there is significant randomization. Communication channels and responsibilities are also not well defined across the company.
Teams rarely work well together, as the culture is competitive instead of collaborative.
Advice to Senior Management
Focus on innovation and customer value, not on shipping more products/features. This company used to be the driver of innovation in the industry, but this image faded in the past few years.
Windows Mobile OS is a typical example of the above.
Improve branding for Windows Live.
Dec 24, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
2.0
Communication
1.0
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
1.0
Recognition & Feedback
1.0
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
2.5
Fairness & Respect
1.0
2 of 2 people found this helpful
Pros
The health care. This is actually the only reason to work there.
Cons
Let's start with some of the nastiest people I have ever worked with in my life. People that are so arrogant and competitive that you get depressed on Saturday knowing you have to go to work Monday. Add in the cult like personality of those same people. I actually got blasted for having an iPod. I think every Zune player sold was to a Microsoft lemming. Sprinkle in a political machine that makes Nixon look tame. Management speaks in acronyms about everything; a typical meeting is so filled with acronyms that you are often wondering what in the blue hell they were talking about. And finally, a product set that is becoming increasingly irrelevant. And the usual lack of work/life balance, improper tools to do my job, the usual minutia if you happen to not submit a time sheet because you were in an airport until 2am on a Friday.
Advice to Senior Management
Resign and move on. Steve Ballmer has outlived his usefulness 3 times over. And spare me the Bill Gates is saint speech. The man spent half his career defending a monopoly.
Jan 5, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
5.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.5
Employee Morale
5.0
Recognition & Feedback
5.0
Senior Leadership
5.0
Work/Life Balance
4.5
Fairness & Respect
5.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
There are few companies that encourage a healthy exchange of ideas, Microsoft is one of them. Also the people that you work with are brilliant and extremely passionate. We do business in almost every country in the world. We embrace an extraordinarily diverse workforce...not just external diversity factors either. We embrace diversity of thought, experience, education ...etc. There has also been an increased focus on improving people management capabilities of front line and middle level management personnel. Traditionally managers were not great at Microsoft. This is changing and at some point in the near future, Microsoft will be known for its great people managers...we are not there yet.
Cons
Competition is king at Microsoft, even internally. That sometimes leads to a lack of cooperation and collaboration across teams/organizations.
Advice to Senior Management
Bury the competition!!!!!!!!
Jan 5, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
2.0
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
3.5
Recognition & Feedback
3.0
Senior Leadership
2.0
Work/Life Balance
3.5
Fairness & Respect
3.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Microsoft's size and product diversity can provide a lot of latitude for a variety of different career experiences. When starting, you'll be expected to stay in-role for at least a year, but after that (depending on the group) you can explore elsewhere within the company. I believe this is the best way to get the most out of the "Microsoft experience". In Microsoft, moving around is good, for a number of reasons. Note that team culture within MS differs widely. Clarify your career goals well, within your own mind, then work hard to get there - leveraging the existing HR processes.
As an FTE, the benefits package is the best you'll find.
The people at Microsoft, in general, are great. Overall, they are quite smart, and famously passive-aggressive. Don't be intimidated, but also don't over-assert yourself - just be relaxed, knowledgeable, open, vocal and confident. Make a point of getting to know a lot of people.
Cons
Microsoft culture is not as pragmatic as it used to be, and is becoming less so every day. MS people used to want to "change the world" (which they did), but now it's much more about "playing the game". The creeping bureaucracy is not, as some say, the inevitable result of growth - but rather the result of a loss of cultural momentum. As the old-timers leave, and new people join, the culture is shifting - slowly, but inexorably (like global warming).
In years passed, it used to be okay to openly challenge virtually anyone's rationale, as long as your argument was strong. Now, that could be politically unwise, and could hurt your career. Bad news used to "travel fast", but now it is more often suppressed. The true impact of modest reportable achievements tend to be exaggerated, often to a great extent. A project with minimal value but great visibility can do a lot to help your career, but the reverse will generally not.
Regardless of recent HR attempts to improve team collaboration, the element of intra-team competition remains as strong as ever, even within the formal reward structure. Helping others on your team will usually not impact your review, but "game playing" to improve your visibility at the expense of your peers is usually rewarded. This is true at every level of the company. Microsoft is not unique in this regard - but you should be clearly aware.
Advice to Senior Management
1. Drive user experience in an obsessive, even fanatical, way.
2. Don't allow "canniballization" concerns to inhibit product innovation.
3. Gravitate toward a more horizontal and de-centralized organizational structure.
Jan 5, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
3.0
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
3.5
Recognition & Feedback
4.0
Senior Leadership
2.0
Work/Life Balance
3.5
Fairness & Respect
3.5
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Large profitable company with lots of money in the bank. There are lots of opportunities to move around within different parts of the company, like Windows, Office, Zune, MSN, Enterprise, Public Sector, Consumer, Server and also geographically. The best environment for career and benefits is in Redmond, the simply have the critical mass to support a very comprehensive benefits package that includes subsidized drinks, health center, transportation, food, etc that subsidiaries like Canada can't. In Canada we are reviewing our benefits package finally. We have not changed it in 10 years! Hopefully it will be for the better, but I hear they will still not match RRSP contributions up to the max available. Too bad since there is no other retirment program from them and the stock has not moved in 8 years!
Cons
While Microsoft always tried to avoid being become large and bureacratic that's exactly what we've become. Our fear was always that we would become IBM after the DOJ settlement. Ballmer swore up and down that we would never fall into that trap, but the reality is with our size and the constant scrutiny be governments around the world we have become this generations IBM. Everything we do is scrutinzed by lawyers first, we all have to go through training to understand what we can't and can do for customers and partners, while our smaller nimbler competitors can react much more quickly than us.
Advice to Senior Management
See a customer once in a while and own the todo and feedback
Jan 4, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
3.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.5
Employee Morale
4.5
Recognition & Feedback
4.0
Senior Leadership
4.0
Work/Life Balance
4.5
Fairness & Respect
3.5
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Microsoft employs some of the world's smartest people. I've been with the company for 8 years and I routinely learn something new from my colleagues every day. We work on projects that are important to 100's of millions of people around the world, if you want to be part of something that has world-wide impact, this is the place to do it. We have fun, every team has a morale budget for parties and such, and we very casual. Most people have their own offices, though seating is based on time with the company so new hires might double up depending on the group. We have the Gold Standard for health benefits, you'll never pay a dime out-of-pocket for any health care.
Cons
You are guaranteed to get asked to help troubleshoot every Windows or Office problem your family and friends encounter, and it doesn't matter if your job has nothing to do with those products. You get teased by family and friends about working for a monopoly and about Bill Gates' hair, you get to hear about how Linux is so superior to Windows for all sorts of obscure tasks, and people send you links to those damn "Hi, I'm a Mac" commercials. Working in the Redmond, WA area means that 40,000 of your neighbors are also your co-workers, many neighborhoods are easily 60%+ Microsofties, so it can get a bit weird constantly being surrounded by the people you work with.
Advice to Senior Management
Drive integration from the top-down. Don't OK a new product unless the integration points with our other products and services are clearly understood, including by those other product and service teams. Get branding and messaging under control, we have seriously overused the "LIVE" brand. Things shouldn't be "LIVE" unless they all work together, otherwise it's meaningless. Don't wait two years to respond to competitors bashing our products, and then do so with strange commercials that don't have any message at all. Leave Yahoo alone, we are in better shape today because we failed to make that acquisition. Stop pouring money into Search, it's a bottomless pit. Face the fact that Google is now a verb and work on ways to capitalize on their success. Wouldn't it be great if Google were "Powered by Microsoft"?
Jan 3, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
2.0
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
2.5
Employee Morale
2.5
Recognition & Feedback
3.5
Senior Leadership
2.5
Work/Life Balance
3.5
Fairness & Respect
2.5
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
The Benefits, discounts on software, some really smart people to work with. The food in the cafeteria is sometimes good. What you are doing is going to affect millions of people.
Cons
The company is too huge ... slow moving ... sluggish. We need more ways of getting things done faster. It would help a lot if there was an easier way to reach employees within the company. We also need more visibility to product groups. It can be very daunting for someone who is starting afresh. Also, there is too much shuffling of upper management and product groups and not enough focus on long term strategy. The lack of openness is also a bad thing. Its about time more stuff was open sourced. It would lead to bugs being discovered earlier causing less of a problem.
Advice to Senior Management
The company needs to be lean and mean. Some major restructuring is required.
Dec 30, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.5
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
4.0
Recognition & Feedback
2.5
Senior Leadership
1.5
Work/Life Balance
3.5
Fairness & Respect
2.5
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Impact and the ability to work on products used by millions of people.
Cons
Incompetence of upper management. Convoluted review system and lack of transparency in compensation. Crappy stock.
Advice to Senior Management
MSFT is going through a mid-life crisis. I would advise senior management to retire and let fresh blood take over.
