Company: Microsoft
Date: 2020-11-19
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

A 12+ year Software Developers' thoughts
Pros: Microsoft Brand. Even a remote villager on the other side of the world will know & respect you.

Good values they stand for. You will see some active ongoing work on BLM issue; you will see candid care & timely response for COVID etc. 

There are still some good engineers & managers left at Microsoft. 

Good Benefits.

No/very less bureaucracy - Directors/Partners will often chat with you and help you resolve technical stuff. Most of the Senior Management is technically Sound.
Cons: Very poor rewards compared to similar roles in the industry. for ex: for Principal role competitors pay over 80%.

Many teams in Azure are stuck in REPETITIVE work like migrating from PAAS V1 infrastructure to the PAAS V2 infra, rotating Certificates etc. Very unproductive. Several quarters - teams would not deliver an ounce of actual Service features - but, just the technical debt. Leadership, higher up - lacked vision & failed to align this well back in 2012 - azure inception times and existing new developers are taking a hit because of that.

Poor tech Vision, atleast in Azure. 

Satya Nadella, the great visionary and exceptional leader - tells a lot of cool stuff - but the middle management doesn't seem to give a damn. Most of them have no idea what he is telling. They don't get time to follow him :). For ex: no/very few managers follows growth mindset or Leadership principles or hiring-in as an interviewing philosophy. They are good people. Just that, they are so worked up - that there won't be any time left to listen to these.

Most of the Teams across the company are moving to Services model. You will end up working 24/7; no family nights; no weekends - if you know stuff :).

Rewards and Compensation model - almost incentivizes people to not share information and work in isolation. This has a huge negative impact on the Culture. Culture in many teams is close to Toxic. 

Large delay between MS Polls. Or in general - data about how things are going or employee experience - is collected like - once in an Year! By the time the data is collected - most of the times - the problems faced become irrelevant.

Movement inside the company is not easy. Especially, Principal engineers have extra diversity based rules - which reduces the available options from an already reduced set.