Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-09-27
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

I hope it will get better over time
Pros: - Competitive salary and benefit package
- Free fruit
- Very nice and smart colleagues
- Ability to use some Open Source software like jQuery and knockout
- The idea of volunteering is nice
Cons: - The first month is a big hassle of getting network access and filling out endless HR forms. If you ask the HR person a question, they simply ask you to submit a question to the HR intranet website. Coming from smaller companies, I really miss a personal touch.
- We are asked to work weekends and evenings, however, no laptop is provided and VPN is blocked from my home computer unless I upgrade to Windows 10 Professional. The no laptop policy will be reversed in 2 months, so I'll have to deal with it for a while longer.
- As a group of new employees we were thrown into a big deadline while taking over a project from another team. So, we have to learn a great deal from the other team while working extremely hard to make the deadline. The past 2 months were easily the most stressful of my career.
- Even while working super hard, the end result is not that great because the partner teams are equally stressed and it's too easy to make mistakes in such an atmosphere.
- Only one 1x1 meeting so far.