Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-06-06
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Competitive environment but not much growth
Pros: Pretty good benefits. Stayfit benefit was nice where you can get a gym membership, reimbursement plan, or a flat stipend. Healthcare wasnt bad either.

Stable job environment. Retention is fairly high and there are a lot of seasoned coworkers.

Company is stable and many product areas to try.

An obvious one, but the status that comes from working for an iconic company.
Cons: Not as much room for promotion or growth (at least on the team I was on). People were very competitive, but the vibe was that management expected people to work with both ends of the candle burning as the norm.

While there are many product areas, my impression is that exploring other teams and trying to transfer to another is strongly discouraged. Transfering to a different division is even more of a challenge.

Not much support by management to explore areas of interest in terms of new tools or technologies. This might have been a culture trait of my team.

Lots of redundant menial work that should be automated, but no bandwidth given to work on tools for these. Also a lot of the existing tools were slow or error prone and needed to be improved or redone, but again no bandwidth given for these.

Not great at onboarding new employees in my team (I am not referring to the general NEO done by HR). Lack of training materials and outreach to integrate new FTEs.