Microsoft

High total compensation (salary, bonus, and stock). The company values D&I, and rewards are not strictly tied to hours worked—you can be compensated the same whether you’re putting in 60 hours a week or simply claiming to be overbooked.

Your past performance reviews—whether from the last 3 or even 10 years—don’t matter. If upper management needs to cut costs, they will let you go without giving you a chance to transfer to another team. On top of that, they typically freeze hiring before layoffs and then restart it only after people have already been let go.

It doesn’t matter if you’re covering the workload of people who already left. Once the immediate on-call issues are resolved, management simply shifts the discussion to how to “optimize” on-call itself, rather than recognizing the extra burden you carried.

I still hold company stock and hope to see improvements as the share price grows. Please focus on driving positive change in leadership.

Too many teams continue to produce poor-quality internal tools that everyone is forced to use, with no alternative options.

Give the real work to those who are willing and able to do it, without pushing them to burn themselves out.