Good work-life balance but politics hinder growth - Program Manager Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
May 6, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Work/life balance is good. I rarely worked past 5:00 PM and can count the times I worked on the weekend on one hand (over the course of 4 years). For the work I was doing (which wasn't very technical) and the amount of time/effort that went into, I was paid well.

Cons

For me, pretty much everything else. The work wasn't particularly interesting, and when something interesting did pop up, it was usually allocated to someone purely based on office politics. Microsoft is definitely not a place where you can show up as a new hire and do awesome things, it's more likely that your co-worker who has been there for their entire career will be assigned the work before you've ever even heard about it. There were also usually ~2x as many people involved as there needed to be, which only slow things down. That is especially difficult because Microsoft is a VERY meeting heavy organization, so you'll spend lots of times in meetings that 1) go over, 2) get rescheduled repeatedly, and 3) are 90% irrelevant to your work. Honestly, there were a lot of other things as well, but I don't have 2 hours to write this.

Explore other reviews about Microsoft

5.0
Jun 1, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good peer interns and full time researchers

Cons

I don't like this city.

4.0
Jan 28, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. If you love tech, this is a great place. No doubt you'll talk tech (mostly the MSFT stack) from enterprise to consumer - from PCs to phones to Xboxes - from datacenter to desktop. 2. What were GREAT benefits are now VERY GOOD (took a small step down) but still probably better than you'll find at 99% of large corporations. If you've got family - the value of the benefits is even higher. 401k match is nice. 3. Even with it's struggles MSFT is still a cash printing machine. This means if you can keep your nose clean and do reasonable work, you can have a stable job, pay your bills, feed your family, and not worry (too much) about layoffs. The stock you own likely won't tank, but probably won't go up much either. You'll get a bonus each year and some stock. It's a decent life if you aren't looking to light the world on fire.

Cons

Brand on Your Resume: After many years of losing market share and struggling to be at the front end of innovation and the fact that there's 90,000 employees, don't think MSFT is necessarily going to be attractive on your resume to more agile and smaller companies. Managing Your Career: Make you say this out loud so it registers - 90,000 employees work there. Double that for vendors. It is VERY hard to "stand out" and move up in the company. Don't expect your manager to be much of an advocate or enabler to help you meet your career goals - they are basically trying to survive the stack rank every year too. Not familiar with the stack rank? Check out the 2012 Vanity Fair article called "Microsoft's Lost Decade".

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