Great place to coast with linear growth - Software Engineer II Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Jan 13, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great work life balance (usually never expected to check work related messages after 5pm) - Nice people across the company - Linear growth is easy to predict and work towards - Chance to work on a team whose product/service impacts millions

Cons

- Linear growth stagnates high-potential employees to grow the same pace as less ambitious colleagues - Way too many PMs and not enough Engineers, this leads to multiple verticals introduced in the same product but no consistency or connection between these verticals - Prioritization of tasks is a joke. There could be an issue impacting 1M+ users but they'll put priority on fixing an issue/creating a feature that the PMs or leadership team want to pivot towards because they think it will have impact (it literally never does). They don't use user studies correctly or even acknowledge customer feedback which leads to important customer requested features to be in massive backlogs. - Engineering quality isn't impressive at all and is easily noticeable in product performance, product bugs, service outages and even internal tools - Engineering teams are underfunded so there is always work to do and not enough time, which leads to scope creep and delays in shipping feature/bug fixes - Build systems are a constant work in progress and policies are continually being added, which brings down development velocity - Hiring bar has definitely dropped and some of the new grad hires are questionable - Pay is less than the industry standard and engineering is underfunded. So it makes a lot of sense when they report earnings every quarter because they're understaffed on the engineering front and still underpaying engineers

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5.0
Jul 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Excellent Benefits and Paid Time Off

Cons

Didn’t allow overtime on my specific project

4.0
Jan 28, 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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