Your co-worker is your enemy - Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) Microsoft Employee Review

2.0
12 Jun 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You will get opportunity to change the world. What you do will have big impact. You will get the chance to create something that your friends and family will actually directly use.

Cons

First, your co-worker is officially your enemy. Expect to be stabbed in the back. Some will say they will help you and tell everyone else how much they are helping you, but then will actually do barely any actual work to deliberately undermine you. Other people will talk badly about you. Others will take credit for your work, possibly your own manager. Most people are good honest folks, but watch out for the bad ones. Especially be watchful for managers who were forced to get themselves promoted out of whatever it was they originally did very well. This is well beyond the normal level of office politics. Your first years will seem great but problems compound over time. This is a result 3 things: 1. The performance review system is a forced curve. 10% of all employees will be graded at the bottom rung and put on "probation" or "corrective measures". Thus, if you do well but are on a team of 10 great employees, you will be in the bottom 10%. 2. You must move up the corporate ladder ("you are expected to grow"). Otherwise, you will be forced out of the company. Even if you are incredible at what you do and love it, you must move up (ex: great SDETs must become managers, sometimes lousy managers). 3. Promotion velocity: if you don't move up the corporate ladder fast enough, you will soon become unpromotable regardless of how well you perform. Second, technical ability is not valued as much as management ability. If you love to code, expect to find less and less time to code as you do more management of either other full-time employees and/or contractors and/or vendors. Contractors and vendors do much of the technical work these days.

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5.0
27 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

good work life balance, culture and career growth

Cons

less compatitive salary compare to other big company

4.0
28 Jan 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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