Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-03-15
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Optimistic but disappointed
Pros: Compensation and benefits; some projects (you have to be very pushy to get the interesting work) and work life balance if you have management support.  Always had a sense of pride working at Microsoft.
Cons: I worked nearly 10 years at Microsoft and always looked forward with optimism to working with intelligent, dedicated, hard working coworkers/leaders and on cool projects.  However, I mainly I saw poor middle management, dysfunctional teams, constant re-orgs, back stabbing, empire building and cost cutting that during my  time I was "reduced in force" twice on two teams.  The first time I landed a new team and never left the company, the second time I wasn't given such luxury--despite getting 1s and 2s and promos over the last few years.  

I left MS with a bitter feeling that I never found what I was looking for.  I met some very intelligent people, but seemingly most had significant character flaws that were disastrous to building high performing teams.  What frustrated the most was the constant empire building and self preservation that occurred at middle and upper management levels...basically what they tell you is just lip service to make you feel good, but no substance.  (Not uncommon at big corporations, so that shouldn't be a surprise)

Before my second "RIF" I had two teams interested in having me move, but my last GM pleaded on two occasions that I not leave; so thinking I was favored by him that would mean a brighter future, so I stayed--yet not 3 months later I was axed with 4 other coworkers.  Best I could figure is that we weren't "diversified" enough to keep, despite all being top team performers with important projects.  Not sure who or how the layoff decision was made, but from my perspective, when you have common traits as far as gender, race, sexual orientation, you don't stand a chance if you are in competition with the  more uncommon folks working next to you even if they perform worse.  (Honestly, 4 individuals on that team who could be classified as diverse had either delivered nothing of important in years, stayed in the same role for many years, or actually screwed up to cost the company money.)  Probably not an unusual situation at large corporations since meeting certain diversification requirements are important to someone up high, so for me it's time to move on to a smaller company.