Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-10-16
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

“Financial safety”, in exchange for strange backroom politics, unrealistic senior “expectations” and tiny bonuses.
Pros: Nice people. Steady paycheck. Great medical benefits.
Cons: - The amount of time spent in Powerpoint is egregious. STOP wasting so much time “telling the story” and build some freakin’ customer centric features.

- Program management is not product management.  They literally don’t have the modern product skill set. They have a project management/timeline based skill set and therefore, it needs to be handed over to UX immediately.

- Engineering has little accountability. Once a year, on every team, it becomes clear that engineering is taking their sweet time and using technical obfuscation (everyone else’s lack of tech stack knowledge) to buy more time.

- Engineering has WAY too much input on experiences which they have no expertise in. I can’t tell you how many devs I have had to “convince” to do the right thing for customers. I appreciate collaboration, but devs are in a role to help execute the strategies of UX and product management, they don’t need to have input into the strategy, just the tech efficiencies within it...because you aren’t qualified or empathetic enough to do so.

- Once you become a senior, suddenly just being great at your job is not good enough and in order to receive any small portion of your already peanut sized bonuses, you will be expected to go “above & beyond” your role and will be viewed as an under performer if you don’t. It’s insane that a 100k person company would expect anyone to stand-out. It is a waste of time, just reward people for doing their jobs well and leave people alone.