It's a good company but culture isn't where it should be - Principal Group Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

4.0
1 Nov 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- competitive compensation and benefits - some team offer really awesome experience of growth for your talents (xbox, bing, macbu) - less heavy burnout that you might experience in other companies such as Apple/G/Oracle

Cons

the company culture is to not be first in innovating but rather play catch up. they pitch otherwise but in a close room the right people admit to be the case. there's desire to change that but culture is the last thing that you can turn around from one day to the other. people organize plans and goals around what is more amicable to their next review outlook, particularly general management. Reinventing a language just because you can mark it off two years later is not delivering innovation. That hurts the company outlook.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
7 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting and varied work. Seasonality to the job allows for rest period

Cons

Less stability than there used to be makes people afraid to take risks

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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