Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-03-04
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Horrible Experience, Caveat emptor
Pros: Seattle (Redmond) is a beatiful campus, very easy to find everything closeby.
Commute can be either horrible, if you choose to live in Seattle, or really nice if stay in Redmond, Bellevue etc. Anything from 10 minutes to more than an hour from door to door.

Compensation and benefits were good, even generous.

Plenty of good individuals and talented people. Some even worked as full time staff (FTE) but more as Contractors in my experience.

Had an opportunity to see a really badly done onboarding, benchmark I'm sure to remember and never to repeat. Which in itself is not that hard...

Friday's seemed to be casual ...meaning people either did not come to office or left pretty early. I don't play golf so was mostly working.

Saw an organisation I will never again need to consider for future positions.
Cons: Be sure to know the team/organisation you are joining and most importantly find a way to contact someone in the team to figure the daily experience. I was a bit naive to accept my new opportunity without digging little more.

My experience was really bad, absolutely no support available to get started.
Seemed everyone was mainly interested in keeping their own little wheels spinning. After leaving and having little time to reflect I noticed how easy it was to start to get sucked to this world. Luckily got out.

I have hired multiple people in my role as manager and never ever seen this miserable way to bring someone upto speed and get them started to grow in the team. My so called superior was totally uninterested in taking any time to explain or agree my role properly. Advice came in the form of "don't do that". No coordination effort in the team, only individuals stepping on each other and a lot of backstabbing and organisational fighting. The picture of different Microsoft departments shooting each other is no joke, it was alive and visible daily. What I heard there are some teams that are better but mine sure wasn't.

HR is a joke and required constant pushing to get anything done. Before joining I was pushing to get issues moving and after starting spend significant time in correcting mistakes. Not sure why HR "experts" were assigned, would have been faster in talking directly to people making the work. Again non-FTE people mainly doing good work.