Company: Microsoft
Date: 2013-07-10
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Terribly disappointing experience
Pros: The buildings are great and landscaping is well maintained.
Cons: The company is right now nothing but a well decorated trash can. From the outside the look is superb but from the inside it is completely rotten. Place is super rife with politics and unless you can play the political game well you will not even get a decent review. Place is filled with managers who want to just save their jobs and care a hoot about everything else. The vanity fair article "Microsoft's lost decade" captures the dismal state of the company very accurately. In fact Redmond operations are still better, the Indian operations are way too worse. No VP cares about the Indian operations and the managers here are having a gala time for the past 10 years taking up only useless projects which are easy to deliver and help them to keep their jobs. 

There is absolutely zero career growth for anyone and there are people at age 44 and above stuck at development lead levels. Now these people have gotten so accustomed to this culture that they neither want to move from their positions nor wish to create space for anyone else. Also they take out their career related frustrations on their sub-ordinates. A manager's word is final in a review process and there is no way you can contest it.

Everything is top down and there is zero scope for bottom up innovation. I was absolutely amazed when I took some new ideas to my development manager and he said he was too old to connect with such latest ideas connecting new technologies in the market. I never went to him with another idea and resigned from my job. 

All this internal churn is definitely showing up with lackluster releases (read win 8) and failed product lines (tablets, phones). In fact when I joined the company, IE was the market leader with > 90% share of the browser market. Now it is a shame that Chrome has overtaken it in the browser game. The company is as usual surviving on Office and Enterprise. A day someone hits the office suite, Microsoft's game is over.