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Good place to work. May not last long as a leader

Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Microsoft for 20 years
February 17, 2018
Redmond, Washington
4.0
RecommendsNeutral OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Experience gained and positive working experience are highly dependent on the immediate team culture, management chain, and product. Some teams are more aligned with industry standards, have a faster development cadence, and a more open development stage.

Cons

Others are stuck in legacy mode, with entrenched management chains and practices.

There is a lack of focus on quality, as PM teams are incentivized to ship features with low quality, low customer engagement, and no long-term quality improvements.

There's very poor integration of web clients with workflows in almost all Microsoft properties. The worst offender is Windows. Rather than aggressively pushing web-based development, they are still pushing UWP—a direct result of the "not built here" mentality. The same applies to Office with desktop apps.

The web-based alternatives exist but are woefully inadequate in terms of feature quality and performance.

The only teams that may have hope are Azure and Xbox, the former because of more modern management chains and the latter because of a renewed emphasis on customer needs.

Advice to Management

Legacy desktop apps, especially office, have no future. Move everything to the web. Focus every resource there.

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