Company: Microsoft
Date: 2021-04-16
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great work-life balance, interesting projects
Pros: - Great work life balance
- Workforce diversity is visibly higher than in other tech companies I know
- Quality of life in Norway is very high
- Good pay and benefits
- Company supportive during COVID-19 (we got 5 extra days of paid vacation for 2021 to take care of our wellbeing)
- You get a Christmas and Easter gift package sent to your house
- Intelligent and skilled co-workers
- People are nice & polite without being too much into political correctness
- You feel you can speak your mind without fear of repercussions
- Company's focus on privacy is a positive differentiator from some other tech companies (think Facebook or Google)
- The focus is on *customers*, not *users*, which means that there's much less of the "user as a product / resource to be exploited" mentality so prevalent in the tech industry
- Very mature product range with world-beating products like Office 365
- Comprehensive relocation support when moving to Norway
Cons: - There is no local HR or payroll, so sorting out any issues takes a lot of time and can be quite stressful esp. when you're relocating
- There is some fighting between the teams over who does the most glamorous bits of data science work
- Systems and documentation are very fragmented, it's hard to find information or to work out how to do things.
- Insufficient investment in computational infrastructure means we have to scale back our ambitions in AI space