Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-07-09
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

A Dying Company
Pros: There isn't a lot.  The overall package is perhaps a little over market.  The health insurance used to be excellent, but has since been abandoned.
Cons: This company has failed in almost every way it could.  With its stack ranking system it aggressively pitted its own people against each other and wholly sacrificed any software company's most critical asset - cooperation.  Amazingly, in their greed to squeeze out more productivity, senior management failed to predict that this would happen. This is supposedly a company of exceptionally bright people, and yet management could not predict something as obvious as that?  Along with cooperation, they lost morale, enthusiasm, innovation and team spirit.  Working for Microsoft is like being in the Mafia, where every team and every individual is looking to take each other out.  This is a verbatim quote from my former manager: "When you talk to someone from {Team X}, smile, but hold a knife behind your back".  Those two teams, which needed to work closely together to achieve any modicum of success, were locked in an epic WAR which was dysfunctional, ultimately laughable, and most of all *typical* at Microsoft.  Neither side shared an ounce of information about their system, critically needed for the other side to integrate their software into, and the result was an execution failure as absolute as the disregard for the final product that each contributor shared.  Like a Big Brother-style reality TV series, Microsoft brings out the worst in people, and not surprisingly, in the software they need to produce as a team.  Also, do not think that you will be able to innovate at Microsoft.  They talk (read: lie) a big game about innovation, but the fate of new ideas is that they take a long (several years), winding and  highly political campaign path and ultimately always end in the trash bin.  Unless, of course, Google releases the same idea in the meantime, then there might be a chance.  Why?  Because Microsoft does not innovate.  It never has.  Its MO is "embrace and extend".  Wait for others to invent, copy the successful inventions with more resources, and try to steal those inventions away from others.  The other great failure of this company was not to recognize that that model could only have success in the slow-moving 20th century.  I remember being brought into an all-hands meeting where it was explained to us that we need not worry about Google's acquisition of YouTube.  Now that we've seen its success, we were told that Microsoft was going to come into the market second and trounce the competition, as it always does, with its new product "MSN Soapbox".  Yea, OK.  Has anyone ever heard of that?  If you work at Microsoft, you will be told that they want you to innovate, but it is literally only an internal propaganda campaign.  Lying to the troops ultimately does not inspire them.