Company: Microsoft
Date: 2019-06-17
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Good Company
Pros: Services side of the house is pretty good if you carve out a niche for yourself at some good customers. Work-life balance is possible but can be tricky depending on customer location and whether the customer requires 100% onsite (e.g. many Federal customers). Benefits package is actually worthy of comparison when adding to total compensation.  Rewards often match output, especially if you learn what your management/senior leadership are looking to quantify for the region or team's overall performance. 

Access to mentorship can be challenging in Services as opposed to the Engineering or Sales areas, but you have access to most of the company and if you put time into networking, it can definitely be done. Access to some of the best minds and best training in the world, but you need to set good boundaries to balance time spent billable vs training and keeping up. They factor in training time, but you have to schedule it at regular intervals and make sure your customer(s) is/are happy with timing
Cons: Challenging for those who have a hard time self-promoting (have to balance between highlighting good/great performance while remaining humble. This is not a company for insanely bright solo performers who have no ability to share their knowledge - a high premium is placed on building upon the success of others (generally not starting from scratch) and promoting the success of others (e.g. build things in such a way that they meet best practices and can be reused in others' projects. In my mind, this aspect is a pro, not a con, but for those who want to go "lone cowboy genius" this is not the place for you unless you are really willing to stretch yourself.

While our software is great, our internal tools need work. Things like timekeeping and customer records are accurate but have quirks that make them tedious to use. While management is aggressively looking to replace these, it is slowly progressing. Not the biggest con if you come in expecting it, but it is a bit disappointing given the caliber of the company.

Finally, there are pockets of services where the customer contracts have been written with very little protection for the PFE or Consultant - you may be asked to do something ridiculously out of scope or unreasonable from a man-power/schedule perspective. While this is not generally the case, you will need to network your way through the situation (leverage peer assistance), while working with the Account team to adjust scope. Some contracts may be so bad that you need to quickly rotate out. However, there truly is plenty of opportunity to move around - you are not hired for a single slot like most other services companies.