Company: Microsoft
Date: 2018-04-18
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Bright and Shiny, but "buggy" when you peek under the hood
Pros: Great pay/benefits, casual environment, fantastic on-campus food.
Cons: Bonus/rewards system encourages only chasing after the bright, shiny, high visibility projects...the "Build".  Does not recognize or reward "Run" operations.  Employees therefore shy away from maintenance or back office operations, and therefore those tend to fail and are substandard.  Limited attention span on projects, not well executed or tweaked to run well (considered run).   Employees are valued only when assigned to bright-shiny projects, once those roles turn to run, or continuous improvement maintenance type roles, those functions are "low value" throwaway roles.  Exceptionally low organizational support to reassign talent from "low value" deemed roles, to absorb elsewhere in the organization.  Seems to be a huge loss of talent.  Microsoft also abnormally values Microsoft specific experience over industry experience at the mid-management levels.  They publically want new ideas, new ways of looking at thing, however in reality, they value the Microsoft way, and internal connections much more.