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Good Perks, Toxic Team Dynamic

Senior Software Developer
Former Employee
Worked at Microsoft for 4 years
July 29, 2012
Redmond, Washington
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative Outlook
Pros

The money and cafeteria are good. They put brand new computers on your desk and 2 monitors. I sometimes got to work from home; it was very useful to deal with all the stress from office politics and Balmer's chair throwing.

Cons

That forced stacking is insane! Basically, you have a team of 10 people, and by the end of a quarter, the manager has to decide who to fire relative to all other people in your team. Even if all are performing a good job, still, somebody has to get a bad review. Guess what that does to teamwork? Nobody wants to help anybody with anything; everybody tries to screw somebody else over.

Horrible!

Advice to Management

Stop forced stacking. If people are lazy, fire them, but don't make employees compete with each other. We should be competing with other companies, not with ourselves.

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