LinkedIn

• Great benefits and compensation relative to your workload
• MSFT stock
• Good food
• A few nice/smart people

Leadership is just trying to keep the lights on and has no unique vision or ideas for the company; they mainly just copy what other companies are doing.

Culture is all but dead post-pandemic over-hiring.

Many claims of being data-driven, but it really matters more who is presenting an idea than what the actual data says.

Mind-numbingly obvious organizational woes are caused by bad incentives. Engineers aren't rewarded for eliminating bugs, reducing tech debt, or intelligently leveraging existing open-source. Instead, they build another terrible in-house tool, make it as inefficient as possible (so they can claim to "fix" it later), and get promoted away rather than dealing with any of the unsustainable development decisions they made. They eschew any work that isn't related to their OKRs (as dumb and misguided as they may be), like helping other teams for the common good, because that doesn't matter towards promotions unless it gets to the point that too many people are actively complaining. They don't make their service more efficient to use less hardware, because it just means their team will have a smaller hardware budget next cycle. Managers are promoted for managing more people, so unsurprisingly there's way too much middle management.

There's weird fake positivity, a strong vibe of preferring to pretend that things are great rather than fixing problems. Bringing up issues usually reflects more negatively on you than it does whoever caused them.

There's no accountability for bad decision-making; failures are addressed by throwing people lower on the totem pole under the bus (or pretending they were actually a success by some measure that wouldn't stand up to any real scrutiny--which doesn't really happen, see the above).

Keep doing what you're doing so that it's easier for a better alternative to gain footing.