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Solid company, interesting projects, very smart people with average managers

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Microsoft for 4 years
February 28, 2019
Bellevue, Washington
4.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

There are some extremely smart people in all aspects of computing, from desktop and enterprise software to online search engines and hardware design.

You can certainly move within the company from project to project and get exposed to a range of interesting problems.

Great benefits and a fairly healthy work-life balance (although this may vary from team to team).

Cons

Red tape, due to its business nature (enterprise software), sometimes conflicts with modern data-driven and fast iterative development practices.

Also, a "not-invented-here" culture is still pretty strong.

Managers are given a lot of leverage at Microsoft. Bad managers float around and are never held accountable.

I had two managers who basically lost half of the team due to attrition, yet still got retained and promoted to the next level.

Advice to Management

Hold yourself accountable before preaching to the team.

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