Company: Microsoft
Date: 2008-09-06
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Get in, and then get out
Pros: Microsoft is a great entry-level place to work. The company is engaged in a loosely-coupled strategy to push work towards the least expensive person they can hire. (Note that they just love Ivy League and anyone from a top-tier consulting company!) The issues that need solving at Microsoft are monumental, and truly worthy of your time and effort to attempt to 'solve'. And there’s technology being developed that nobody else in the industry would even attempt.
Cons: The Curve: despite all you've heard about that being in the past, it's here and bigger than ever. Which means you have to have a manager who will fight for your promotion and is under pressure to keep employees at the levels hired, unless they've attracted senior level attention. Be bright, ambitious, and knife your way to the top: it's classic. Of course, the downside is you have to work in that environment.

 The top 10% of the curve can be rewarded well, even lavishly, but performance won't be enough; you need to sail past your peers, so in a really quality group, you're screwed, somebody has to fill the middle or even the bottom of the curve. Microsoft has always been severely hierarchical - teams are for drones to follow orders. 

Having  90,000 employees makes hierarchies seductively attractive for weak bureaucrats, and Microsoft does believe that excellence can be driven by the top 10%, which, if promotion was meritocracy-driven: maybe. But where smooth-talking politicians are easier to promote, the leadership can be hit and miss. 

Microsoft, even for the fast-moving superstars, offers no training other than what's gleaned on the job, and given that a majority of top managers have never worked anywhere else and have no other perspective than 'drinking the corporate Kool-Aid', the probability of working for a bozo who is scared stiff and unable to function or promote team members, is, unfortunately, pretty freakin’ high.

Microsoft needs an intellectual enema: we have legions of people standing on their thumbs one minute and then racing 14 hour days trying to make things function. We have an obfuscating layer of untrained managers who squirm and hide when bold decisions or true leadership is required. The hierarchy that semi-functioned when Microsoft was small, no longer works. It causes huge inefficiencies and lost shareholder value as the numbers outstrip the ability of hierarchies to offer enlighten direction. As painful as it would be for Microsoft employees, the company needs a IBM-style crisis to force a new look at what businesses it makes sense to pursue, and how to motivate employees to create really noteworthy software. 

Make sure you’re not working for Microsoft when that happens.