Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-08-28
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Many amazing growth opportunities
Pros: At Microsoft you're expected to be a self-starter and in charge of directing your own career. You drive you career as aggressively or slow-paced as you prefer. Work-life balance does exists, but it really depends again on how aggressively you want to drive your career here. If you have a great idea, you are encouraged to pursue it. Management is supportive of coming up with new and creative ways of doing this. People managers are more like coaches than "bosses" and generally follow sound management principles. 

If you can "navigate" in this matrixed organization and can deal with not having all the answers but still being expected to try you best to come up with a solution then you will be happy here!  

The people here are brilliant. Super smart and really friendly. They are genuinely interested in helping you move your career forward and will help you in any way that they can. You can easily find mentors and make connections here. 

The Benefits are great! Free gym membership, premium healthcare insurance, and a lot more.
Cons: Not for the feint of heart. Microsoft is increasingly complex and you have to be able to put all the pieces together and understand how you fit into the grand scheme of things. Sometimes you really can feel you're not even a "blip" on the radar here. It's really important to build a good network if you want visibility and a good promotional trajectory. 

Promotional velocity can be a bit slow with too much of a focus on the dreaded "length in level". On the other hand, people get promoted to very senior positions without the role necessarily requiring it as a means to retain that person.  Usually this doesn't end well. 

Unstable Organizations- with so many merging and splitting and reconfiguring of teams and structures one can feel as though stability is lacking.