Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-01-16
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

It will take years to remove vestiges of the now-gone stack ranked HR bureaucracy
Pros: Technological immersion - constant new technology. Stack ranking is now gone.
Cons: HR's idiotic and stifling stack ranking (or curve fitting) of employees is now _supposedly_ gone (as part of the "One Microsoft" reorganization). I fear the bureaucratic and myopic HR remains  It will take years for HR's poison to be cleaned out of Microsoft. Due to stack ranking, there are now thousands of technically shallow and dispassionate managers tucked away.

I must wonder whether HR employees were held responsible for their years of employee abuse (it appears not). Over the years, HR trained MS employees well: You were to climb on the backs of your fellow employees, you must avoid working with those who are "better", you were to work according to the metrics your manager imposed (which were frequently idiotic ones, not much better than a "lines of code" metric), and you were to transfer anywhere else, as quickly as possible (so that you stay 'fresh', in your manager's eye).  

Prior to the reorg, the head of Sales & Support required Sales training upon all, required no Support training, and completely misunderstood the purpose of Support (he apparently thought Support was suppose to make sales pitches). With Sales and Support now supposedly split up (per "One Microsoft"), perhaps such damaging behavior has been limited to just "one" of the many Microsoft divisions..