Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-05-16
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

15+ year career at Microsoft and should have left 10 years ago. Life is much better outside Microsoft.
Pros: - Great, sharp people
- Surprisingly great products still, especially back end products
- NW is a wonderful place to live
Cons: - Management - most managers I've dealt with only manage up and a little sideways and simply don't have the people manager skills or desires to properly take care of their reports. They only listen to their loudest reports. This management "culture" seems to be a result of Microsoft's stock early, quick ascent until 2000. Managers didn't see the need to nurture and build their reports since many Softies retired after 4-5 years. Why bother building people when you knew they were short term anyway? After year 2000 people getting rich at MS dropped significantly but the management culture did not change and appeared oblivious their old idea of being lazy and telling their reports to own their own careers was not healthy for the company nor their reports. Perhaps things are finally changing with the new review structure but unfortunately those managers who thrived in the old system are still the gatekeepers to making the new system work. Good luck.  
- At least in the groups I was part of, the engineers who get hired are consistently from a narrower and narrower band of personality types which restricts diversity of thought and action. I guess it makes it easier this way to plug and play engineers when the wind changes and a VP or director is replaced and they want to reorg. 
- Dev and test merging into one. I'm a dev and I always respected and appreciated those in the test groups who had a passion for testing and breaking things. Their passion wasn't necessarily to design and build the software. Now, everyone gets thrown into the same soup and guess what, the former SDETs are usually handed a lot of the test work but now, they won't rank as high as the former SDEs since many DEV managers still value product  code output over testing. Many outside companies are happy to grab the disgruntled former SDETs so it's a boon for those companies. Unless this changes, it will be easy to predict, over time, Microsoft software quality will drop. 
- Work life balance. It's getting worse. I talk with my old friends still at Microsoft and they continue to be more and more warn out with increasing loads being placed on them. Some are dev managers and even though the products they work on, especially cloud, are getting many more users, their teams are not allowed to grow. In fact one friend who has had a number a folks leave over the past few years because of lack of work life balance, has not been allowed to hire new people in to at least backfill those who have left. Yes, the team has to get more efficient but largely by making the rest work harder and harder. Comparing Microsoft's profit/employee ratio to largely advertising companies like Google is a fallacy.