Microsoft

"Depending on the department, you have amazing flexibility to balance your work schedule and how you handle your tasks. I’m in my 3rd role in the past almost 5 years and I have a lot of opportunities for growth. You get out what you put in. "

"Consider manager and feedback as may not be as honest as what is actually happening behind the scenes "

"Diversity is a core of the culture at Microsoft. Would love to see more women working and enjoying the work life at Microsoft."

"If you are with PromoteIQ, good luck to you and yours"

"The supportive and growth-driven culture is impressive. Our leadership is continuously pursuing feedback to improve all aspects of our careers. It's the 2nd happiest place on earth!"

"Culture is very team/org dependent. Ask questions to see if the work culture will match or not."

"You must be prepared to work inhuman hours to meet utilization rates in order to hit targets set for you. "

"Even though technology is still primarly a man's world and often sales, especially tech sales is as well, I haven't felt that because I am a woman I am treated differently or have less opportunity."

"Due to the nature of being a tech company, the ratio of men to women is very unbalanced, but there are womens networking groups that are amazing . I highly recommend joining one for the mentorship and support."

"It can be an exceptional place to work, but be prepared for long hours and overfunctioning if you're in a support role. "

"Microsoft has been around since the 70s, and the intense, misogynist, numbers first people last culture will take time to change - I acknowledge that. I worked there for three years on an engineering advocacy team, developer relations, and what I observed from leadership across the board was privilege supporting privilege, backchannel politics and some serious game of thrones moves, and no bias to action when underrepresented folks spoke up and asked for help. The "in need of assistance" thread that went around last spring is a great summary of Microsoft's current culture for women (there are a few articles about it, if you look that up). I saw and experienced exactly that. The stability of a large company is a plus, the mediocrity that fails up is a minus. Overall, it is the only place I regret working at in my entire career and do not recommend it for women, people of color, non-binary folks."

"There's plurality, there's equal pay, but engineers rule the day. They use a 1990s model to compete in 2020 and it's so very broken. It's rare that anyone in product can rise into senior leadership in the product groups. If you're in product design, they run WAY too lean to make modern products people will love. So there a lot of missed opportunities and you have to be OK with that."

"Very supportive of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, amazing benefits, competitive compensation and strong women leaders throughout the org. "

"There is no time flexibility. I cannot imagine working there if I was a Mom."

"Lovely place to work....lots of free stuff available for employeese"

"Big emphasis on pushing inclusivity and diversity. Most teams are still predominantly male here though."

"Amazing company run by smart and caring partners. They are constantly improving our benefits and work environment. "

"There's opportunities for women if they believe that we can do anything we set our minds to. "

"Microsoft Retail is still what you would expect from retail. Trying to move up is pretty hard but there are days that I really feel that I have made a difference with my team. I think that there is so much more growth that needs to be done at the retail level, it is very much a male dominated space. "

"The volume of work is immense. Very flexible in terms of when and how the work gets done. Very common that working mothers spend the day in meetings and do actual work in the evenings and nights. 3 hours slee not uncommon."

"Set a timer on how long you want to stay at a big company like this. At some point career progression is going to be more about subsribing to the culture the leadership team wants and not about your skills."

"Make sure the team supports diversity and inclusion. Not just the direct manager, since that will likely change, but the org as a whole."

"It is a good place for women. I have always had a good share of opportunities to grow. "

"Great insurance, maternity/parental leave, and the culture is moving in the right direction. "

"It's getting better. I believe that we will continue to see improvements."

"Find a good team, move to another team when your needs aren't being met."

"Microsoft is really making an effort to promote female leaders. Unfortunately, in some areas, the work is not aggressive enough. In others, the promotion of women is so aggressive that there is now--and will continue to me--backlash. "

"In the male-dominated tech world, women either have to work twice as hard or they are put on the "mommy track" . It's hard!"

"Flexibility isn't the problem for me, but the on the ground culture is competitive for all the wrong reasons, not customer focused enough and not accountable."

"Great benefits, and they are working hard at diversity. The top bosses get that things need to change but there is still a huge undercurrent of people who don't understand what all the fuss is about"

"The company is dedicated to developing women in their careers through regular women in leadership conferences, "coffee and conversations" events, recommending specific women mentors for women earlier in their career, excellent maternity leave, excellent benefits overall that support work/life balance. I highly recommend Microsoft to other women. "

"It is such a huge company that it is hard to know what your experience would be, so I would try to talk to women on the specific team you’re looking to join. It’s a lot better than many companies out there, but that doesn’t mean it’s good."

"This is a great company to work for, amazing management and co-workers. Work-life balance is great."

"Well diverse company with a laid back culture. It is a great place to work with flexible hours. "

"LTs aren't ready with women inclusion strategy and conversation. Though lots of talk... "

"Watch your back and pay close attention to the nuances behind what people say ("be a team player, not a critic" is not a good motto)"

"Make sure you document everything and search out positions you'd like to move into. Advocate for yourself!"

"pick the right team and manager for you as its so important because your team and manager really count on you. make your boundaries clear. keep track of your successes. build great relationships at all levels, get a mentor immediately and network, network and network some more."

"Ask for what you want. Promotions and salary may be not be given up front but if you ask you will get a lot more"

"Great company to work for, but watch out for gender bias"

"Men are promoted based on potential. Women have to prove themselves (with ever-moving goal posts) for the same positions."

"Seek out a senior person to help guide your career development other than your boss. Managers change often and it is important to have multiple allies. "

"It has a great attitude to maternity, pays well but is a "old school club" environment. Lots of people who have been there too long in jobs they really can't do"

"Great place to work, super work life balance, and super career advancement opportunities."

" great place to work at for a good family life"

"Microsoft is good at supporting Women, depending on the org you are in. Not all are supportive of maternity leaves or medical leaves, but the good orgs are investing in women. BAPI, or now they call it BAG, is one of those orgs. "

"It's better than most places and I have a very positive experience"

"This is a pretty good place to work. I liked it."

"Microsoft embraces diversity and I encountered no significant issues as a woman due to company culture or policies. As a global company, it is inevitable that a few co-workers or partners may have a pre-existing stigma around women, however this was a challenge to embrace and overcome by earning their respect."

"It's better than most places and I have a very positive experience"

"this company has Great benefits, and senior leaders support diversity & flexibility"

"Go for it, amazing opps for women! not sure careers are for everyone though"

"Good upward movement until you get into Directors and above"

"It's a good place to work, but like any other tech company, you have to be aggressive and sometimes things are unfair the higher you go."

"You need to be very assertive to borderline aggressive to be noticed as someone who has impact, if aren't seen as having impact you won't progress and will eventually be managed out. If you're looking for a promotion, it is expected that you're working at the level of the promotion before you're considered a candidate."

"I agree with other women's reviews that you're manager impacts 95% of your experience and review. Although the amount of effort that I put into my job has remained the same over the last 10 years, my reviews have varied wildly depending on whether my manager liked me or not. The first five years I regularly got feedback that I was too abrasive, despite seeing men never get this feedback. I landed under a manager of that saw no value in my skills and that was like hell for two years. But other years I've had managers that really liked me and I've been a top former. Honestly it's a crapshoot. The maternity leave is very generous, that's probably the best thing. But each time I've come back from maternity leave I've had to switch teams because the new mom bias is terrible. I never talk about my family at work, I find that to be much easier to help avoid mom bias. "

"Great benefit and maternity leave. It is really family friendly. "

"The group I'm in has lots of women in technical roles. It has been a leader in women-friendly and family friendly policies. Not all teams are like that, but good ones do exist."

"Competitive family leave policies in line with top tech companies"

"There is lots of support for families at Microsoft. As with many large corporations, the support of women and promotion to leadership varies by group. Some managers and teams really get it and have made changes. Others have not. Yet. I believe Satya Nadella is working hard to make necessary changes."

"Hours are moderatley friendly. I wish more people worked part time and/or left early. "

"The company can still be doing so much more for women... You won't encounter any blatant sexism but the culture is still very much all about 'the guys' at the top and being part of each department's boy's club."

"Microsoft if a great company to work for in terms of work/life balance, and taking care of a family but you have to be careful and mindful of the busniess groups to advance professionally "

"Choose your manager very, very carefully. Research by searching out other women who work in that group and ask to sit down and have a private chat outside of theory office."

"If you join, build up a network of supportive female professionals. Don't trust HR. Don't fill out polls or surveys. Just do your job unbelievably well, and you will slowly rise to a point When it is time to move on because you hit the glass ceiling, do that. Try moving around every two to three years to resist "tracking" and growing stale. It can be hard to move around, but with determination you can usually pull it off."

"I wouldn't say it's any front leader but offers decent options. "

"Great place to work. Flexibility and great culture. Women treated the same as men."

"I would encourage young women to work here, because it is great when you are early career. I would recommend mid-career and later to go elsewhere."

"Benefits are fantastic. The impact of the software we build is immense. I've been working hard and I've been getting promoted at a relatively fast rate too. It took me a long time to reach a point where I was unhappy with my job, and initially I didn't know why I was unhappy. After I admitted to myself that gender might be playing a role, I've been doing some soul-searching and I now feel that I deserve better. I am looking for something better. Some women seem to be on teams they love. I haven't heard many of those stories, though. Microsoft is doing a bunch of public talking around diversity. Microsoft is walking some of the talk, but overall there's too much talking and not enough walking."

"Be careful of raising any valid complaints, such as sexual harassment, or unfair pay, because you will be punished for that - retaliation is strong with this company's HR and Legal. Review for GE Aviation"

"It's hard watching your male co-workers get promoted while you're told that you're not doing enough."

"Beware of the hostile work environment and unequal opportunity for women. India dominated leadership and technical workforce has different cultural attitudes towards women than the USA culture. Bullying and exclusion is commonly used to force women out. HR and diversity program does nothing to improve reported issues. Check public discrimination lawsuit documents to understand widely known, unresolved issues. "

"Search public discrimination lawsuit documents to understand the environment for technical roles. Leaders and staff from India and Middle East countries have different cultural attitudes towards women. "

"Technical teams can be less female and family friendly."

"To ask other women on the team you're considering joining about they're experiences. The way women and minorities are treated varies drastically from group to group."

"I've worked here for over a decade. Multiple groups, roles and divisions. Women are welcome to work here but don't expect to get promoted or have the same opportunities as men - to be fair a subset of men (white or Indian). The culture can be rough, bullying is common and behavior that is acceptable in the workplace is not that which you would want your child to repeat. There are good and smart people who work here, they just aren't those typically promoted. You will reach mid-level and realize you do not respect or like most of the people at your level and above. A woman cannot respond in the same abusive manner as a man and if she calls him out on it will be penalized. 1 in every 3 experiences tends to be good."

"Mature company with senior people, so benefits are great for people with families. Workload had its peaks and valleys, but very flexible culture, so great for juggling life and the demands of being a working parent. It still felt like a "boy's club" in many aspects, especially in my field, where it's predominantly women, but at the top, it was predominantly male. So, there's work to be done. Having said that, since the new CEO came onboard, Satya Nadella, and his participation in the Grace Hopper conferences, it became more friendly to women."

"Microsoft is not fair to woman."

"I worked for 3 years before I was able to use the maternity leave at MSFT. I had an incredible support system where my manager was a woman and her manager was a woman as well (though childless at the time). They scraped the barrel to find as much time off necessary to give me a full 5-month paid leave plus suggested to come by the 6th month as part time. They paid for my pump through the Women's Leadership's Council funds and installed a lock in my office for privacy. Where else could you find such flexibility? Granted I had female managers but where else would you find 2 female managers to begin with? It was blissful."

"I've been with the company for more than 10 years in various positions across 4 divisions. In most of them I didn't feel like being a woman was a disadvantage. In fact, my skills at building teams and meeting deadlines put me on a fast promotion path. However, my current organization is an old boys club, where promotions, projects and bonuses are based on popularity contests, not on actual results."

"My experience is in the UK. I have been here 15 years and love the company culture. If you like working with smart, friendly and collaborative people. Having fun at work, being empowered to work when and where you want and to feel that your work has real impact then consider Microsoft. My 2 kids both went to the on campus nursery and now they are 11and 14 they sometimes accompany me into the office for a day. I know nowhere else like it. I have the freedom to set my own schedule and fit work around family. Work has supported and promoted me throughout my career."

"I've worked here more than 20 years. It has really changed over the years. I have faced subtle and not-so-subtle bias over the years that has affected my career and financial compensation. Age-discrimination is as bad, if not worse, than sex discrimination, which combined, is pretty bad for women over 40. You can expect to be "managed out" sometime in your forties whether you are a man or a woman. The recent change to the review system has turned the system into a subjective evaluation (popularity contest) rather than one based on facts around what was accomplished. I would recommend looking only at teams that clearly have a higher ratio of technical women than average (which can be found on the Microsoft website.)"

"I've worked here for 10 years. The company is very white male heavy. There is also heavy pressure within the company to advance. It's sort of frowned upon to get into a role and stay there for a long time (like, 3-5 years is usually the max). There is heavy competition for advancement opportunities and its very much a who you know kind of thing."

"I've worked here for 7 years and have had both male and female management chains. All are great. There are some women in leadership that seem to have something to prove, but there are plenty of men like that too. I've worked at a number of different companies and Microsoft is the most fair and equal to women, and has the least amount of sexual harassment. Highly recommend it here."

"I have worked at Microsoft for 5 years and it is generally a decent place to work for women. It is more difficult if you are in engineering or have an engineering centric role as it is very male dominated and the men are generally hot heads, think they know it all. The company is decently good at work/life balance for men and women, but its very manager specific."

"There are lots of career opportunities for women and there is a growing openness to improve the experience for women. Networking is still very important for all employees to get recognition and opportunities. Managers are better equipped and skilled at managing across differences and not just from a gender perspective."

"I've been here almost 10 years. Some groups are fantastic about treating everyone commensurate to their skills. Others perpetuate the boy's club - not listening to women or even not inviting them to meetings that are important. If looking at this co, ensure you talk to everyone you can in the group..."

"It can be a boys club."

"The Leader to who I work for, used bad words, even during meetings and also over the phone!! my daughter who was 9 at the time even heard them, during the Company wide required feedback, I provided honest feedback about his bad words, which rather than taking them as an area of opportunity he instead made my life a living hell. I ended up leaving that team in less than a year. He made sure the next manager also gave me horrible time. I ended up losing my job. There were almost no woman in that team."

"Sexist. Ceo is trying to change culture, but hasn't trickled down to middle management"

"Women can have a vastly different experience depending on the team they are on, and their manager. In my 15+ years, I have had good managers and bad ones and it has made a world of difference in how I am supported and the opportunities I have received."

"Like most tech companies, most women are in marketing, HR, administrative roles rather than engineering roles. Some female managers in engineering disciplines came up from the administrative/clerical ranks and harbor biases about how women should act at work vs. how men should act. If your work style is more assertive, technically confident, and quick to speak up, and less apologetic, deferring to men and hesitant, you'll have trouble under these managers. How to identify them? Look for women without solid engineering experience who are running teams. Often seen in technical publications teams, but can exist anywhere. If you are a developer, be prepared to run into men who first assume you're product/marketing, and then program management, before finding out that you're a dev, because female devs exist in significant numbers in such a large company, but are still not common. Some of my best contacts there are people who first assumed I was just an English major helping write product marketing copy, and then found out I had architect-level skills and could offer technical feedback. Among the seriously-old-guard (the 20 years + club), it's a boys club. But most of them aren't in your daily life, so you just let the boys be boys, and get on with your job. That said, much of the company is gender-blind (or at least willing to apologize when called on unconscious bias), and if you can steer clear of the female admin type managers, your skills are likely to be recognized on their merit and you could find yourself with a great opportunity. As in any big company, it is ALL ABOUT POSITIONING. Get on the right project, and you can get attention from people at the VP level and higher, quickly. Get on an ordinary project, and you can make a good living and stay mostly invisible for years."

"I'm relatively new but so far it's a very good place to work. The legal department has LOTS of women -- possibly to make up for not having very many on the engineering side."

"."

"I worked at Microsoft for 8.5 years and loved my career there. You have to be protective of your own balance and set expectations with your manager, etc... I think Microsoft does a great job around professional development and ultimately is invested in helping employees get to where they want to go."

"There is general fairness, but the management and workforce is heavily male dominated. Networking with men is difficult, especially if it happens post work over drinks. I also have worked with a few senior people ,manager (1 out of 6) and ICs where I have been judged on likability instead of assertiveness and performance. I have not seen this criteria extend to men. The other area which needs work is when people are given more focus if they share their criticism and opinions, rather than collaboratively proposing solutions."

"There's sub-cultures. Some divisions are great for women, some not so much."

"You'll have a hard time finding a place where you can grow your career faster and with the work-life balance I find here. However, with no female leadership from the account teams through to the CEO, I've faced countless aggressive comments internally (and externally) with no support or understanding. While Microsoft says that it values collaboration, mentorship and openness, you are often looked at critically by your peers for displaying too much of those attributes (and won't find your peers displaying them either). All in all though, I am very happy here and plan on staying for a while."

"Work life integration is a challenge wherever you go, whatever your choice. I think it's important to work to solve this within the context of your own situation, knowing what's most important to you, always pursuing your goals, and learn from/lean on others, develop your village. It is possible to have everything you want .... perhaps not all at the same time (though I haven't given up on this yet either! :)), but it's important to maintain perspective."

"I've worked here 15 years and have had years where I would say this was a dream job and years where I'm wondering how to get out and its closely tied to the organization. As I've gotten more senior I see more of the double standards and how org specific it is. In terms of broad benefits the company is amazing, can't complain. In terms of interpersonal support we need to get rid of the "old microsofties" who are focused on survival and move to a thrive model."

"Not sure"

"I like working at MS, tons of opportunities and great possibilities to grow and learn. I like the culture and enjoy coming to work every day"

"Microsoft's policies encourage equal treatment for all employees; however, the individual experience one can expect is extraordinarily dependent on one's manager. I've been a full-time employee (FTE) for over a decade, and have more than twenty years' history working for Microsoft (I worked as a contractor off and on prior to joining as an FTE). In the years during which I had managers who were capable and objective (and even in some years when I had managers who were not very capable but were at least objective), I was always a top performer in every team in which I worked. I got a new manager this year and was suddenly given a "zero rewards" [no bonus] review that was attributed not to my contributions (or lack thereof), but to my personality. Not only was there absolutely no supporting evidence given for the assertions about "how" I do my job, but it was demonstrably proven that my manager had not actually talked to anybody with whom I work before creating the review, with the exception of one colleague who has spent years denigrating me. Moreover, despite getting no bonuses from this manager, he was forced to give me a raise of >$10,000 because that's how much less I was paid than others with the same job title in my organization (and the salary was required to be normalized regardless of review). In the past six months, five of my male teammates have told me that they believe my current manager has "issues" with and is "threatened by" women, "manages by intimidation", and that I'd be treated very differently if I were male. These were unsolicited statements, each of which was made after the colleague witnessed various of my manager's actions (and in some cases, his profanity-filled screaming fits directed at me as well as other employees he dislikes). My manager's manager is widely known to be out of touch with what's going on in his organization at lower levels, and his solution to a top performer suddenly being given a poor review and a directive to "get out" was to tell me they do want to keep me in the organization (I'm fairly senior and am technical, both of which are sadly rare across the company), but he has continued to keep me reporting to the manager who has admitted that he does not like me and who has given me an extraordinarily biased review containing numerous false statements. This is despite the fact that there is a peer manager to whom I could report instead. If my manager's manager was genuinely interested in getting a well-rounded assessment of my performance, a simple way to do that would be to shift me to the other manager and see if I continued to be evaluated as a sub-par performer. I would have attributed this experience to a personality conflict between my new manager and myself were it not for a number of incidents (literally dozens in the last six months) in which my manager has, in writing, credited male colleagues for work I've done (to which they did not contribute at all); has blamed me for inadequate work done by male colleagues (which I had no involvement in); has refused to acknowledge or act on several instances in which one of my male peers has delivered abysmal work to the point that we've had to engage legal to deal with the fallout when customers complained; and has pushed the only other woman on my team into grunt work that is so below her capabilities as to be laughable were it not for the fact that it's about to drive her out of our organization. One of the very few other women in my organization (women comprise <10% of employees in my director's organization) was undergoing chemotherapy and she was actually criticized by management for poor meeting attendance during the time when she was fighting cancer. We are losing people left and right because of poor managers (my current manager is not the first bad manager that has been added to our organization by our director in the past few years), and the director usually writes these departures off as normal, even "positive" attrition [meaning- "it's a good thing s/he left, because s/he wasn't a 'good fit', anyway"] After I received my most recent review, when I shared my experiences with a few close friends, I was shocked at the number of similar stories I heard from or about both current and former Microsoft employees. I genuinely believe that Microsoft's most senior leaders want to drive an inclusive, fair culture, but there is an ingrained culture that, if an employee receives a negative review, even after years of being a top performer (whether male or female), it's treated as a problem on the employee's part, not as a potential problem with the manager who delivered the poor review. The experience one has at Microsoft is incredibly dependent on whether that person's manager is an advocate or an adversary, and the system is geared towards supporting the manager, not the employee. I've seen many stellar people driven out of Microsoft because of this, and it is not only women to whom this happens, but in the case of it happening to women, the "justification" for the negative reviews (and firings) that they got has most often been about their supposed personality issues ["aggressive"; "abrasive"; "domineering"; "it's not what you do, it's how you do it"] rather than because they didn't deliver on their commitments and assignments. Microsoft is a company that wants to treat people fairly, but it is unfortunately structured in a way that ensures that that doesn't happen. Rumor, innuendo, and "reputation" propagated by a bad manager carries more weight than praise and kudos from dozens of peers and other teams/organizations does. This isn't sour grapes on my part- I very much want to stay at Microsoft and I actually think that outside of the team I'm in, the organization of which I'm a part is somewhat better at treating women fairly, although there's definitely a "she's difficult" bias against women who are assertive, driven, and/or willing to call out problems in the organization, coupled with an incomprehensible support of male employees who underperform again and again but are vocally self-promoting. Had I been asked a year or two ago if women are treated fairly at Microsoft, I'd have said that we are, but that would have been based entirely on my own highly positive experiences up to that point. It was only when I experienced the "dark side" myself that I started to run across women who have had similar experiences, and in many cases, who also pointed me to even more women who had, as well. For women who are considering working at Microsoft, I'd say the following: 1. Your experience is heavily dependent on your manager and your manager's manager, and those can (and will) likely change a number of times over your career at Microsoft. If you interview and don't get the strong feeling that your potential manager will be your advocate and wants to hire you not just because you're a woman (there's pressure to recruit and hire women and minorities across the company), but because your skills and capabilities are desirable to the organization, run away and look for another team to join. Don't be afraid to ask if you can speak with other women in the team/organization; if there aren't any, if they're only found in "non-technical" roles such as HR, marketing, legal, finance, etc.; or if those women aren't able or willing to enthusiastically articulate how they feel about working in the team, think carefully about whether you want to join that team. And if you're somebody who wants to rise to senior levels within the company, be prepared to have to be more politically savvy and self-aggrandizing than you might normally be comfortable with. Now that I've written that, I'm reminded of a female colleague who recently joined Microsoft and who was brought in at a level far below what she should have been hired at, as well as being told by her mentor, "there's a fine line between keeping your manager informed and 'bragging'." I wish I could say that that attitude wasn't common."

"I have worked here both as an FTE and as a vendor for over 14 years. Never during that time did I ever feel discriminated against. However, like so many other organizations it is all about who you know when it comes to promotions or job moves. I feel fortunate to be working at MSFT especially now that we have Satya Nadella at the helm !"