Microsoft

Microsoft Brand. Even a remote villager on the other side of the world will know and respect you.

Good values they stand for. You will see some active ongoing work on BLM issues; you will see candid care and timely response for COVID, etc.

There are still some good engineers and managers left at Microsoft.

Good Benefits.

No/very less bureaucracy. Directors/Partners will often chat with you and help you resolve technical stuff. Most of the Senior Management is technically sound.

Very poor rewards compared to similar roles in the industry. For example, competitors pay over 80% more for a Principal role.

Many teams in Azure are stuck in repetitive work, like migrating from PAAS V1 infrastructure to PAAS V2 infrastructure, rotating certificates, etc. This is very unproductive. For several quarters, teams would not deliver an ounce of actual service features, but only technical debt. Leadership, higher up, lacked vision and failed to align this well back in 2012, at Azure's inception. Existing new developers are taking a hit because of that.

Poor tech vision, at least in Azure.

Satya Nadella, the great visionary and exceptional leader, tells a lot of cool stuff, but the middle management doesn't seem to give a damn. Most of them have no idea what he is telling. They don't get time to follow him. For example, no or very few managers follow a growth mindset, leadership principles, or hiring-in as an interviewing philosophy. They are good people. It's just that they are so worked up that there won't be any time left to listen to these.

Most of the teams across the company are moving to a services model. You will end up working 24/7, with no family nights or weekends, if you know stuff.

The rewards and compensation model almost incentivizes people to not share information and work in isolation. This has a huge negative impact on the culture. The culture in many teams is close to toxic.

There are large delays between MS Polls. Or, in general, data about how things are going or employee experience is collected only once a year. By the time the data is collected, most of the times, the problems faced become irrelevant.

Movement inside the company is not easy. Especially, Principal Engineers have extra diversity-based rules, which reduces the available options from an already reduced set.

More education and alignment for Middle Management on Satya's vision and goals.

Fair rewards policy for the Senior to Principal band. This layer is generally very dissatisfied, has a very high attrition rate, and is very hard to replace. Even worse, they have followers.

Azure LT should consider funding based on a proactive vision, instead of reacting to the market. Things like Managed Identity, Key Vault, and Unified RBAC across all Azure services, for example, came unacceptably late in the game for Azure. These are a few examples of how funding based on tech vision would have helped.