Microsoft

The company has given me a lot.

I've had steady growth until I became a Senior (every 1 1/2 years of promos) and had the pleasure of working with some wonderful, bright people.

The benefits are great, and work-life balance is much under your control.

I have been involved in different projects in the same team every 2 years, which kept my enthusiasm high as I was learning something new often.

If you are an entry-level person looking to gain knowledge, Microsoft is a good start.

If you don't have aspirations of being a VP, then get out by the time you become a Senior.

It's just not worth dealing with the "politics".

The review system encourages "networking," or, as I like to call it, brown-nosing in many instances.

Not everybody can keep trending up, but they can still do a wonderful job. The company does a poor job of recognizing that.

The move to combined engineering is a mess. We have managers who want to transition to the new agile methods but want to apply waterfall evaluation methods, which doesn't make sense. The next few years are going to be make or break for employees, and many could be frustrated with the half-assed move to combined engineering.

Moving to new teams is not easy. Lots of openings do not get published on the internal career site.

Testers and Developers are evaluated differently. Testers are expected to do a little bit of everything, i.e., PM, Dev, and Test, while Developers aren't. In the combined engineering model, this mode of operation will not fly.

Senior testers, who are now merged with Developers, will find it hard to "compete" with their Dev counterparts, as testers are now expected to be more Devs than Testers. It's not a level playing field anymore.

Testing in itself is going by the wayside at Microsoft. While some rethinking of testing is necessary, I don't think the current approach of letting Scrum teams do all their testing is going to fly. Look at some of the reviews of the Microsoft apps in the store; they are horrendous.

To those teams who are making a commitment to combined engineering, go all in and go in with a clear mind. The moment you start trying to hybridize the model, you are going to lose.

Get rid of the fiefdoms.

Get rid of more of the middle management; you don't need that many. Maybe put them on the tools team!

Unify toolsets across the company; every team does not need to make a new toolset.

Get the tools team to be agile and work towards a common toolset.

The lab teams need to be more flexible and less process-focused, promoting agility.

Take risks; don't play it safe all the time.