Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-09-10
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Mixed feelings about this company
Pros: I worked as an FTE here for five years. People are smart, it's a fun environment, salaries are good, and there's a lot of variety in the work. Health benefits used to be great, but now they're pretty much on par with other companies. I left the company for the reasons stated below, but now I work at Microsoft as a vendor. There's a ton of work available for vendors/contractors at Microsoft! Most teams want to hire contractors with prior Microsoft experience, so if you're a former FTE, you've got it made. If you accept a vendor position with one team and hate it, you can end your contract and just search for a new contract on another team. And the best part is, as a vendor/contractor, you don't have to deal with the horrible performance review system! And you don't have to deal with stupid "visibility" projects. You can just do your work and get paid for it and not have to deal with the internal politics. It's a sweet deal! You'll notice that more and more of the contractors/vendors at Microsoft are former FTEs, and now you know why.
Cons: Company has gone downhill since I first started working there. The biggest problem is the performance review system. They've revamped it several times, but they still use a stack-ranking system and award scores based on a curve. This is horribly demoralizing! To make matters worse, your manager can award you a certain score, but managers above him or her can lower your score in order to get their org to fit the curve. So if your manager gives you a 2, for example, a higher-up manager can lower it to a 3 because the org already has too many 2's. How screwed up is that?! I finally left when this happened to me. I worked my butt off, got a great review, but then the GM bumped my score down because I wasn't "visible" enough. The guy didn't even know me! God forbid he actually listen to my manager (who knows my work) and read my review! How are we supposed to stay motivated knowing that at review time some random manager can change our score at will? Over the years I found that employees in general are more concerned with trying to make themselves visible to management so they'll get a good review, than they are with trying to put out a good product for our customers. The focus is all me, me, me, when the focus should instead be on our customers.

I worked as both an individual contributor and as a manager during my time here. I found that Microsoft doesn't value good people-management skills. They want their managers to be PMs. They want managers who will keep projects on track and lead a multitude of special projects. The actual people-management part of it takes a backseat. I loved being a manager outside of Microsoft, but being a manager inside of Microsoft is a thankless job. You don't get paid any more for managing, and it's twice the stress. That's why so many managers decide to go back to being an individual contributor.

The other big problem is that people switch teams all the time. Teams are constantly losing their knowledge base. It's really bad when PMs leave, and then new PMs come onboard and have to ramp up, or they decide they want to redesign how something is done in the middle of a project. Oh, and re-orgs happen ALL the time! That screws up everything, including project schedules. No one knows who's responsible for what, and all the worker bees twiddle their thumbs waiting for management to figure out what the heck is going on.