Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-10-30
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Seasoned FTE
Pros: For young professionals, and more specifically for Developers, Engineers and other technical or related roles, Microsoft is a major school that will yield solid foundation, will enable the participation in challenging projects and even provide decent compensation and benefits.
Field sales roles will also have the opportunity to make very good money in a not long period.
Cons: Microsoft has been developing a very political environment and the previously called stack ranking process (which was only rebranded for PR purposes), together with the "good attrition" target that every manager has (they are forced to let 5% of the people go each year), have contributed to the toxic and non-collaborative atmosphere in the company. After lay-offs and good attrition became standard operating procedure to make adjustments for any internal or external deviation, there are many "clubs" where groups of a certain affinity protect each other and play with the fire and hire tactics to keep each core intact, trading internal positions to give the impression of career movement, just to mention a few of the unfortunate aspects of the company's culture (or lack of). Microsoft became a company of middle managers that are very savvy on the political play, on making arrangements for survival with little to no space for taking risks, creativity or even have opinion.