Company: Microsoft
Date: 2019-11-03
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Customer Focused Engineering
Pros: Competitive compensation, job stability, work-life balance, high visibility products
Cons: Bad architecture due to Microsoft's unwillingness to do full rewrites. End up building on top of badly designed software which leads to further bad design decisions to make it work. Technical debt is ever increasing which makes it feel like a losing battle. Product focus is on delivering new features in time to compete with AWS at the expense of engineering quality.

Internal tooling is pretty awful. There's many tools that achieve the same functionality, and each team uses them differently. It makes engineering productivity extremely low, senior engineers can overcome these mostly by building their own hacky tools.