Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-04-04
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Great pay outweighs remote management
Pros: Great pay and benefits
They have a massive poll once a year and they really seem to listen to our responses
When you have a good manager, you are set up to do well and advance in pay/responsibilities
Cons: Management is a toss-up. In my 5 years with MS I've had 9 managers. 1 was excellent, 2 were decent, 2 were a nightmare, and the rest were forgettable. Of those 9 managers, 6 of them were in a different location, and 4 of them I never even met in person. This makes it really hard come review time.

They have a weird review system where basically a certain percentage of the company has to be let go every year. This makes for a lot of competition, obviously, and also makes it hard to really help or collaborate with teammates, since you're basically doing everything you can to not be that bottom group of people.

They claim that it's easy to move around the company, but I've found that to be very untrue. Once I was hired, I stayed in my role for 2 years, became a subject matter expert, and then tried to move on to the next thing. I wanted to expand my knowledge, keep learning, and try something new. It's been 3 years since I started trying, and I'm still in that same role I started in. And I have great reviews, so you'd think other teams/managers would be interested in me. But the reality is that moving from one team to another is incredibly hard because the way we are trained here makes us incredibly knowledgeable in one small field, and basically clueless in everything else. I wish I had a broader knowledge base. This also makes it hard to find new opportunities outside of the company.