Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-11-09
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

OK company, but not a great place for hardware engineers
Pros: Pay is really good, benefits and total comp are pretty competitive. Cost of living is lower in WA than in CA. Easier workload than other hardware companies I've worked for.
Cons: Organization in the hardware teams is nonexistent and has pretty bad leadership all the way up the chain of command. Lots of layoffs since joining (over 7,000 people from the Nokia acquisition, hundreds of others from Xbox, Surface Hub, etc.). People don't seem driven and put in minimal effort/hours. Many are just cruising with their high-pay, low-stress jobs and focusing their time on things outside of work. Have to use Microsoft technologies to get all your work done (Outlook/Sharepoint/OneDrive), none of which work well because they push the internal buggy versions to everyone's machines. No real "company culture" that I can identify with. The company is focused way more on software and the hardware engineering operations are kind of a joke.

Personally: project was canceled within three months of taking the job. The job I negotiated for was also not what I was placed into and management didn't seem to care. Ended up being a big step down on a technical level. There's an overall lack of any real challenge and, for most of my time here, a lack of any real work to do at all. Team was not prepared for my arrival -- couldn't log into computers, couldn't access emails, had no badge/couldn't access the building for four weeks and had to call coworkers to let me in after using the bathroom. Horrible experience from end to end.