Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-04-02
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Senior Content Publisher
Pros: Fun products to work on. Fellow team members are great to work with. The content groups at Microsoft may not be shipping code, popping champagne at parties, or hob knobbing with fancy upper level types,  but, content publishers are down to earth, creative, smart, and work earnestly to give Microsoft customers helpful information. They work super hard to save customers. Many content teams have great feedback systems where you will be able to see how effective your content is. And many systems provide customer comments that can be extremely complimentary. 

Choose the group. Have informational interviews with the boss and team members if possible before applying for something. If you feel cozy with the boss and other teammates, have a formal interview. If you sense a negative or stressed out spirit, don't interview. Have an informational with another manager and keep moving til you find good people. 

Great working environment. Nice cafeterias. Pretty good health coverage, although the paperwork and overhead required to manage reimbursement can be a little time consuming.
Cons: Being in the content discipline can be challenging here, because devs and PMs are considered the most valuable. So occasionally you have to wrestle information from someone who thinks you're not as smart as them (tip: just rollover, you're probably smarter anyway and it's a waste of time proving yourself to them).  Or sometimes you have to prove your worth to people, which can be exhausting. Just keep your eye on the prize, do what you do best, and crank out the content.

There's also this: There's your job (content), and then there's the extras. The extras here are not really extras. They're required for you to survive. The extras are labelled differently depending on the manager or group: projects, stretch goals, stretch projects, visibility projects, being visible, v-teams, etc. You'll be asked to do this. So be ready. Gone are the days where you just work on content.

There's a new campaign called One Microsoft that seems to lessen the competiveness. And it's helped some people, but others are stuck in the old "don't step on my turf" syndrome. 

In my experience managers don't manage your day to day, they manage the people above them and occasionally dip down to see what you are doing. This can be really awesome at times because you have freedom. But occasionally you do need direction, and  they may not feel knowledgeable enough with your work to help out. Usually you have to sort it out for yourself.