Company: Microsoft
Date: 2016-09-09
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Good employer great experiences, not treated well when you leave
Pros: Great people , great experiences, some very good management, ambition of the company is vast, great technologies, great working environments, very international. I enjoyed my work, you work really hard, its quite intense, and you have to be confident of approaching lots of people you don't know and building networks across the business. You are well paid and benefits choice is great. There are opportunities for training, you have to seek them out other than mandatory training such as diversity and equality and so forth. In all I had some great experiences , worked with great people, and made very good money.
Cons: You can be in a situation where things are ambiguous you have to deal with that and if you don't you will have a problem  , some managers will leave you literally on your own, and literally spend all their time managing up, one manager I worked for, for  six months , I saw her three times in six months.  It can be quite hard to get meaningful training as your workload is very high, and unless you have a manager that wants you to get on , you can run into a wall of indifference about your development. If you have a quota focus on that to the exclusion of anything else, don't let anything detract. There are battalions of lawyers that literally hold things up and have no recognition of commercial deadlines. Processes are tortuous, long winded, paper and system driven policed by accountants, lawyers, compliance etc , it can be very hard to make that process  move and you have to build relationships to do that. Basic things like paying a developer or supplier in a country outside your own can involve conference calls to up to 15 people. I left Microsoft this year as a part of the large redundancy program (17K) people overall. When you leave there are loads of promises that you will be helped to find internal roles, you wont be helped, HR say this but you are totally on your own, They also say they can extend your notice if you are in process for a role internally , they wont, they push the manager to make a decision literally after the interview,  they cant so you are unable to proceed. A job I applied for which I had two and half years on that product line, I interviewed for, and all seemed well , my feedback was  one line and I didn't get it , I then saw this job advertised two weeks later as  a contract role with a staffing agency word for word the same job description at 50% of my salary....   They also say when you are leaving you can extend to cover stock vesting they would not extend me for 9 working days (I requested this as unpaid) I lost 14000.00 as a result. HR are completely inaccessible you can only contact them via email, they never call back, they only do the absolute bare minimum and my advice is never expect anything from them at all ever and get everything from them in writing or it is meaningless. Ironically for the company that pretty much invented IT , internal tools such as getting access to resources, finding data, getting signed into programs and drives you need to access is again a painful process, you have to apply for logins that take ages to get approved, chase people to grant them and the processes can be clunky and slow. For example any pay query goes to outsourced providers who literally ignore the query, its all online , the answers when they come are ridiculously inaccurate reflecting the total indifference of the poorly paid staff in India that have to process these queries. Finally I would say you will move almost every year, and if your business unit is not doing well, look to move in the fiscal year early, as HR in their wisdom enacted the "consultation" period on Jun 1st this gave 30 days and then your notice started July 1st which is end of fiscal year, there are no jobs posted in July as all budgets come down 2nd /3rd week of July and new jobs are posted then. You will be left with literally 7-10 days to apply, interview,, and get to 2nd interview (near impossible).  If you recognize your business unit is doing badly look around and get moving as your bonus, job, stock is always at threat even if you are doing well personally, you can meet your target (I did) over 100% in first half of fiscal (Jun to Dec) business unit did badly Jan to Jun (2nd half of fiscal) even then I made bonus , makes no difference you are out. Don't assume you are safe as your business unit can disappear overnight. I moved four times due to restructuring in five years. MS Corp in Seattle is famously disconnected from international markets, it is not a global company it s a US company that tries to force US centric models onto international markets, quite one size fits all, and as a result lots of head scratching when things don't work .