Microsoft reviews

As you move up in ranks, the pay disparity between Microsoft and its competitors (Google, Amazon, Facebook) starts to grow, with Microsoft developers making substantially less than their counterparts. For some, this is okay if they value lifestyle more than career progression. For others, it's common to jump ship to another company. As with any other big company, there's layers and layers of bureaucracy. For most mature teams, all work will be carefully planned months in advance, specced, discussed in multiple team meetings, with dedicated PMs and testers. In the beginning this is good because it teaches the absolute best, gold standard way to develop large software. After a while, it can become very dull and repetitive though. The annual review system, which invariably involves peer feedback and encourages backstabbing peers, can be maddening. Even after spending several years here, most people will find it's hard to break off of the railroaded promotion system and really shine as a superstar, just due to the seniority-based culture and siloed nature of the work (you don't have the expertise to move into a management role or more technical area that's already being done by someone more senior, but by never doing that role you'll never build expertise). Also your experience is hugely, hugely team dependent. Local team culture matters way more than anything that happens at top management level. Two employees at two different teams can have drastically different lives. Maybe the things I list as pros are actually cons in your team, and vice versa. Unfortunately there's no real way to tell what it'll be like working on a team until you actually start working there. You can gauge the number of young vs old developers to get a sense of the culture though. Despite this Microsoft is still a fantastic company, no regrets after having worked here for 6 years. The opportunity to work alongside world-class engineers to ship code that all modern versions of Windows use has been a privilege.

I’m still pretty shocked at my experience since day 1. I’ll try to leave emotion out of it and share the historical events that occurred to remain truthful and not exaggerate. When I first came in as an MBA here, I was brought into my dream finance role. 24 hours after joining, my manager went on paternity leave for about 8 weeks. I heard from him a couple of times in that timeframe and that was about it. I got started working on some onboarding projects and everything was more or less fine. My office was on the other side of the building so I didn’t get to sit next to my team for the first 7 months. My teammates never really came by to say hi so it was tough to build new relationships with them, having to walk over constantly to try to connect. After my manager returned, he only talked to me a handful of times. I’d say I sat in about 8 hours worth of 1-1’s over my whole year there. I never received a performance review or feedback on a single project. I never received a quarterly or year end performance review. I never heard that I did well, but was reassured that that wasn’t my manager’s style. He’s never really one to say “good job”. Not great management. I never felt like I was wanted in that role, and I heard from numerous people that I was placed in that role by a recruiter and was never actually placed in an open role and thus I wasn’t really wanted from day 1. Now for the part that I still am just in shock around. In my organization, I was the only white person. About 3 different times, in team meetings, jokes were made about how I wouldn’t understand something or couldn’t relate because I was white and not Asian/middle eastern. I just brushed it off and laughed, but felt like I experienced a form of racism that I had never felt before. Having not felt like part of the team ever and then had them make jokes about my race at my expense... it really didn’t feel good. But, because I’m Caucasian and not something else, if never felt like I could say anything about it because it’s Seattle and many people believe racism against Caucasian people isn’t possible. I would disagree based on my experience. At the end of my time, after declaring I was leaving, I never heard from a single HR rep. I had so much I needed to share and I didn’t even get an email about my departure. Nothing. Zero. No form of exit interview. No goodbye. Nothing. So now I’m sharing this all here because I didn’t get to share it internally. It was the strangest exit I’ve ever had. The moral is: people leave managers, not companies. Microsoft is a spectacular company, but my management experience was really, really poor and HR really dropped the ball here. I was so sad too having come into my dream job and feeling unwanted completely from day 1. I would’ve stayed if even one person showed that they cared in the least. I had shared this with multiple friends there on my last day who had been there for years and they were in utter disgust and shocked that HR had never reached out. They reached out on my behalf and even that didn’t trigger a response. I’m just really shocked and sad. I was really excited to build a career at Microsoft and chose to leave due to this experience.