Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-05-04
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Deeply regret the precious years of my life that I lost working at Microsoft
Pros: - Brand value to some extent - Microsoft still commands decent brand value outside, so if you have clocked a good number of years specially as an full time employee, it does have some weight-age. 

- Lots of real estate and large office spaces (Redmond City is pretty much built around Microsoft offices) - Compared to other companies cramming their employees on floors, Microsoft has many buildings and most employees get a room by themselves. This is changing though, with many teams moving to open floor plans. If you are in Redmond, the commute is awesome. Your office would be 5-10 minutes from your home. 

- Good hiring bar which leads to intellectual peers and team mates - I think this is the best part. A lot of candidates get rejected and the bar is pretty high. Because of this, only the creme makes it into the company.

- Good perks specially the healthcare benefits and stock options you get in every appraisal cycle.
Cons: I spent a lot of years at Microsoft. The exact number of years is irrelevant, but looking back, I deeply regret how many years I have lost to really not doing anything substantial (i.e, changing the world). I will try to provide some insights to help you decide. 

You wont ship a thing in years : I have been in teams which have not shipped anything externally for years. Most of the work is lost either because the product is shelved or because the sponsor of the project vanished (everyone in Microsoft knows when to jump off a sinking boat really well). 

New leadership : The new CEO is doing a lot of good things. But things continue to be the same internally. Most changes that are pushed down remain in the news for a few weeks and are then conveniently forgotten. They are done because the CEO wants it to be done that way. No one really believes in it, but since they have to protect their jobs, they will pretend to adhere. They just do it because they were asked to.  

No of engineers Vs work available : With about 60,000 people in R&D and limited product lines (Windows, Bing, Office, Xbox, SQL, Azure to name a few), honestly there are more engineers than the work available in the company. Most teams re-invent the wheel by doing the same projects across different orgs. This is what I did and saw many other teams do in my long tenure with the company. We used to do exactly the same work that was already done by some other team often knowing that it was already attempted. And to make it worse, we would leave the work half baked so that some other team would again do the same thing in the future.

Complacency : No one questions anything because they just want to get their paycheck and continue happily. 

No worthy competitors in the neighborhood : There is absolutely no other big company in and around Redmond  which could absorb Microsoft employees and also pay the same salaries. This creates a terrible situation. Employees don't want to move out of Microsoft as they cannot find a job that pays as much. Honestly, many employees are also afraid they will not be able cope up with the high demands of jobs at other companies. That's the bitter truth, whether anyone confesses it or not. 

No goodwill for other development centers : I will keep this short. There is not much goodwill in HQ, Redmond for other, possibly more efficient, global development centers. My managers and their bosses would do everything possible to malign the efforts of other development centers and create as many obstacles as possible to make their work look bad. 

Dev/Test/Combined Engineering - The Dev/Test orgs continue to be the pillars of the company, but with the latest combined engineering model things have started to deteriorate. As an example, look at reviews of the Office products which calls them half-baked . Quality is non-existent at Microsoft nowadays. 

Performance appraisals - Earlier there was a rating system which was a good thing because you knew your trajectory. If you got good ratings over a few cycles, it would create a good pressure to get you promoted. The rating system was eliminated a year ago and now there is no indication of when your next promo might happen or how is the employee trending. It is just a continuum and you can stay in that limbo state as long as you wish to. 

Poor end user products - To top it all, the company makes poor products. I know you are thinking why did I spend so much time in the company when I think so poorly about their products? To be honest, I tried my best to improve them when I was around. But I could barely make a dent. Compared to other companies, it is difficult to rely on Microsoft products say in a life and death situation (for ex, with your smartphone). 

Already many teams are loosing revenue to other software companies that are selling free software. This has lead to massive layoffs. It wont be long before the remaining customers move to these new platforms, please note that these customers purchased Microsoft products mostly because they did not have a choice at that time. Now they do.