Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-10-19
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great if you're lucky to work at MS. Terrible if MS is lucky to have you.
Pros: - Work life balance is respected, so you have time to develop yourself outside of work
- Compensation and benefits are generous
- It's a family friendly company if you're at that stage in your life and want to slow down
- The company is financially stable ( for now )
Cons: - The ratio of PMs to engineers is ridiculous. There are only a handful of engineers for every PM in my org. Our backlog keeps growing, while the features with the best "visibility" and the least amount of investments gets resourced.

- Many of the PMs are non-technical. They've landed this job due to dumb luck, then wonder why the over-worked engineers can't get this done faster. When work items take longer than expected, IC PMs are pressed to ask them to "work faster".

- The more talented people at the company leave. Those who stay are the ones who can't get jobs with similar pay elsewhere. Those who stay and take on work with great "visibility" great promoted. This means that product planning tends to be short sited. Seniors only want to work on something they can get done before the next review period.

- It's getting more difficult to recruit. PMs are joining in increasing numbers from non-technical domains. They may have domain knowledge in the space, but they're not engineers. This is going to  exasperate the problems I mentioned above.

- Upper management is very disconnected from the reality of building software in the modern age. Most of them haven't touched code in decades, or have been around since the early days of the Internet. They think we are a first-class engineering company, yet we don't have real time metrics, continuous deployment, technical debt controls, testing...

- Not agile, despite at the rhetoric.

- We're so much on building a culture around everything except having a great software engineering team.