You can do anything at Microsoft - Director of Program Management Microsoft Employee Review

5.0
Jun 15, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The chance to have significant impact on products and services that are used by and are important to hundreds of millions of people around the world. And, because the company does so many different things, if you get bored or dissatisfied by what you're working on or the people you're working on, you can switch to something different very easily. From conservative cash cow with tons of process to nimble, risky startups with 5 cowboy coders, the company has all kinds of groups. The benefits are top notch - no we don't have free food but we have good food and it's not too expensive (and if we had free food I'd probably gain too much weight anyway). Also, there are pockets that do have free snacks - it depends if a group wants to spend part of its budget on snacks for the team - they typically sit in the group admin's office rather than in a microkitchen. One con is the process and bureaucracy - but the flip side is that things run incredibly smoothly. Support services, such as building maintenance & moves, IT, etc. all are well funded and make what seems like magic happen to the individual employee.

Cons

It is huge, and there are multiple groups working on roughly the same thing at any given time, competing from their own perspective. The inefficiency is disheartening although it usually works itself out in an OK way given enough time. In any huge company there are some poor managers and you hear some horror stories, although it seems like after the Vista release, many of the more senior ones were encouraged to leave.

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5.0
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CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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Cons

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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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