Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-05-14
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Bureaucratic but manageable
Pros: Sophisticated set-up for web experiments (at Bing). Repeated experimentation evolves a system highly optimized for its user base.

It might take significant effort to find an appropriate contact in another part of the company, but once that contact is made, it can cut lots of future bureaucratic red tape.

The unification of dev and test worked well.
Cons: Closed-source technology silo. Tracking down issues in Windows or Office are unreasonably difficult, even with connections to people on those teams. Some internal tools seriously lag behind in quality from comparable ones in the mainstream.

Some managers are known to fly into a temper. While such behaviour might be unacceptable at some companies, it seems to be freely tolerated.

Resistance to retrospectives and post-mortems.