Company: Microsoft
Date: 2019-07-10
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

So far so good; early impressions of new job
Pros: Industry leading compensation and benefits, good culture, very comfortable workplace environment. They will do whatever it takes to enable you what you need to do your job. Other tech companies it can be a nightmare to just get the basic things you need to do your job but here they go out of their way to make sure you have what you need and are comfortable. Honestly the office is so high end and all my stuff is so nice, I don't even want to go back to my crappy apartment at the end of the day.

The work life balance has been really great so far. I previously worked at a company that everyone claims is the best for work life balance and it wasn't. Lots of people say it is bad at MSFT but I haven't experienced having to work evenings and weekends yet but I'm still new (< 1 yr). So far my manager is fantastic - really invested in my success. I'm hoping it stays that way.
Cons: I've heard horror stories from ex-employees and one does not need to go far to find them on the internet. None of that has been my experience so far. There are over a hundred thousand people working here so I don't doubt some teams / organizations could be more miserable. I also work at a satellite office where it is more laid back than on the main campuses.

The downsides I have experienced is it's easy to get out of the loop / disconnected from the other engineers on teams that aren't directly associated with your own team, but teams that you need to work closely with to get your job done efficiently. In other words: it's a big company and it's hard to organize multiple large teams spanning multiple time zones. 

I also am working on a relatively small piece of the puzzle. It seems many people run the risk of being silo'ed. They move people around periodically to prevent stagnation. This isn't really an issue to me because I will do whatever it takes to remain employed so the idea that one should have to always be engaged in the most important tasks etc. has always kind of felt like a giant sentiment of entitlement that most of my millennial cohort adopt so this is not really a con to me.

And who knows, they could fire me next month and revoke my starting bonus and I might be singing a different tune.