Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-07-16
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Bug fixing job, salary not that great
Pros: - Good for you CV.
- You learn how to deal with software complexity and company complexity.
- Decent benefits and stocks.
- You can work from home.
Cons: - Work life balance is OK, but still not aligned with danish IT market.
- The salary is a bit below with the standard IT danish market, but expectations are above.
- Many people are "informally" required to be on 24/7 from time to time (including Christmas holidays, Easter, etc.), with a low extra pay.
- There is a lot of legacy code, and a lot of code is bought from external comapnies, or it is outsourced and then integrated in the products, which makes the code base very hard to read and poorly written.
- All the work going on is always secondary, where the main things are going on in the US or in other countries. This also means that Microsoft Copenhagen may not survive for a long time.
- The engineering work is pretty much bug fixing and some small enhancements. There is little space for innovation, and innovating requires diving into the huge bureaucracy.
- Software and people management is complex, so everything moves very slowly.
- The company enforces a 6 month review where employees are evaluated by managers and coleagues. This is well known to generate a toxic competitive environment with a lot of hypocritical people.
- Too many management changes.
- High turnover rate, because of many people quitting and because of many firing.
- The company mood, work life balance and benefits are gradually dropping.
- People are not that smart. There are excellent people, but the average level is not that impressive.
- People are maintenance-oriented instead of being engineering-oriented.