• Like many high tech areas, the high cost of living surounding the company can be a drag. There seem to be a large number of retired “Microsofties” in the area. With their cashed out options from the 80s and 90s, the home prices went through the roof. Due to the geography (Lake Washington, Lake Sammamish, hills and mountains), there are fewer places to build homes. As a result, the demand versus the supply is very large. Home prices have stayed relatively high even through this past year’s market downturn. Generally, if you don’t have two full time incomes in your household, you won’t be able to afford a reasonable or nice home; you’ll have to settle for a condo.
• Microsoft is always short on employees. This means your will most likely be short of developers and test engineers on your team forcing you to work a little more, and cut or postpone features. Psychologically, this can be a demoralizing, especially when you are excited about and believe in your project. Employees move around often, you can never be sure if you’ll have the workforce the team needs to deliver features for the next version of your product.
• Microsoft generally follows the market and will hold off on creating a product until it’s clear there is a large demand and a clear business justification. As a result, we appear like a company of “Jonny come latelys”. Remember Microsoft Terra Server from the late 90’s? Too bad it took Google Earth for Microsoft to realize what a great product this could become.
• Even though this is the most ethical, moral and giving company I’ve worked for, Microsoft has the “Evil Empire” stigma. It gets old being approached and castigated by uninformed “lesser minds” that buy into the FUD.
• Microsoft creates software for business and industry first, and the consumer second. This is a wonderful business model but at times if feels like you’re creating software for others, and not the software that you’d like to use yourself. There is always another company that needs you to tweak your product so that their 15 year old non-RFC compliant application will work with it. YAWN!
• You must have true business justification for ideas and plans you’d like to implement. When you work on your own software in college, you create what you like. But in the industry, you can’t do things that seem “cool” to you. One simply doesn’t say “hey, let’s put a popup stopper in IE!” You’d have to show how it would benefit the bottom line for the company, or wait for another product to implement it and push MS for parity.
• Although we have the best R&D, I rarely see management with the forsight to put amazing ideas into our products. Sometimes it reminds me of Xerox in the 70s - Amazing breakthroughs, but the powers that be don’t understand them. 75% of the “innovations” I see at Apple and Google were revealed years before at Microsoft Research fairs.
• They still haven’t supplied the company with free Zunes! :-) (Apple employees all received free iPhones!)
• Few female engineers. I’m told they were a species hunted to extinction around these parts.
