Microsoft

• Competitive salary and benefit package
• Free fruit
• Very nice and smart colleagues
• Ability to use some Open Source software like jQuery and Knockout
• The idea of volunteering is nice

The first month is a big hassle of getting network access and filling out endless HR forms. If you ask the HR person a question, they simply ask you to submit a question to the HR intranet website. Coming from smaller companies, I really miss a personal touch.

We are asked to work weekends and evenings. However, no laptop is provided and VPN is blocked from my home computer unless I upgrade to Windows 10 Professional. The no laptop policy will be reversed in 2 months, so I'll have to deal with it for a while longer.

As a group of new employees, we were thrown into a big deadline while taking over a project from another team. So, we have to learn a great deal from the other team while working extremely hard to make the deadline. The past 2 months were easily the most stressful of my career.

Even while working super hard, the end result is not that great because the partner teams are equally stressed and it's too easy to make mistakes in such an atmosphere.

Only one 1x1 meeting so far.

Encourage your managers to care as much about their employees as about results. Pushing too hard rarely gets you the best results.