Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-01-14
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current

Program Manager II
Pros: Work life balance! I don't need to do almost anything. I go to work at 11am, leave at 3pm, spending most of the time doing my own stuff. If you want to get retired, Welcome to Microsoft!
Cons: 1. No Growth. After 3 years you wonder what you know after all when you talk with people from outside. And you are self-conscious what you can do if you are laid off. Perhaps nothing.
2. Debating Country Culture. So many employees from a specific country that is full of vendors, and those employees sometimes give me an illusion that I'm currently in that country. You understand what I mean. PMs from this country are so good at debating that they eat debating for a living. They bury you with debate in meetings that you are totally lost.
3. PM Managers and Directors. They are a joke. They shouldn't have existed. They are humiliating themselves. They are pure overhead that brings down the engineering team's morale. I seriously believe Microsoft will benefit from firing all PMs, but allowing PMs to convert to engineers if they can survive a high-school level coding test.