Microsoft

I started here doing contracts for testing over a decade ago. It was better pay than other areas and offered free drinks and various services. It was great working with like-minded people for the most part, and I made a couple of friends. Out of my many contracts (I've had about 8), I've often had good managers who were nice and good people. When you don't know all the things going on in the background, it feels like a great place to work.

Have been on multiple different teams because each contract has a hard-end date. By the time you come back after a break, your position has most often been filled.

Very little to no chance of going from vendor to FTE (aka a blue badge). Have heard of one or two people getting promoted to this, but even as my managers hated the fact I had to leave because of my hard-end date, they and their managers could never make an FTE. Seems like you have to know someone or be very well-trained. Experience matters not for this, as I've had people come in as FTEs above me who didn't know the first thing about what was going on. I've even seen them leave only to be replaced by more people who don't know what the heck is going on.

Budget cuts all across the board (this only started in the last 2-3 years) meant every couple of months we had to find budget for my position. It's hard to plan anything when your job is always in jeopardy due to budget cuts.

They have been shifting from a test and dev team to a dev-only team that also does testing, which has been leading to more and more bugs in all areas.

Don't expect things to work as intended. Even trying to get a copy of Windows to perform a test on is difficult, as they keep changing the way to obtain those copies. Currently, I don't think you can.

Mostly old/outdated tools are used because the creators of said systems are long gone, and new people coming in don't know how to create new tools. It's kind of like 'if it's not broke, don't fix it,' but yet they keep adding features which break other things. (e.g., I can't search any directory. It just doesn't work).

No vendor appreciation. If you come in as a vendor, we are called dash-trash because we're not FTEs. Many, many times a year, you will feel underappreciated due to the fact that the FTEs get treated so much better. From PTO (my manager(s) have all had at least 3 week-long vacations this year and are still going to take off half of December) to events (FTEs get paid/fun events on a near monthly/bi-monthly basis; for us vendors, it depends on the agency you are with, and for most of us, that means no events at all. Though I did have a cool manager that would take us out each time there was a FTE event. That was my favorite manager of all of them. He treated us like equals).

Final Con: The bubble is slowly collapsing. I've seen the products going downhill, from Xbox to websites to OS. Bug counts have never been higher. Budget cuts are happening everywhere I have ears (cafeteria workers, receptionist workers, software testers (especially testers), shuttles, cleaning crew, designers, and who knows where else). The current team I'm on works with a core part of Windows (not going to say for anonymity's sake), and we are using a process/tools from over 2 decades ago, and bugs are flying left and right. I've made recommendations for improvement since this system needs to be retired, as it wasn't designed to work with what we currently are using. However, it means nothing when your manager and their manager just shrug it off and don't listen. My manager used to have 10 underlings, but now it's just me. I'm leaving soon, and he's retiring soon. They've made zero attempts at offering me a position taking over his role, which to be honest is okay since I'm not in love with this field. But that's the problem: the people who made all the good stuff are now gone, and the new people are either too lazy or too ignorant to know the situation. I'm about to reach another hard-contract end date, and I don't know what the future holds for me, but I don't think Microsoft is part of that future. Unless they start making some good decisions about their products soon, I expect in 8ish years, Linux or some other OS will become dominant, and Microsoft will no longer be the standard in home computer systems.

My Advice

1. Find your focus. Your focus right now is like a disco-ball. It's all over the place! You need to focus on what needs to be done for the future. In this case, I would say the Windows OS. Place focus on that and get it up to par or even birdy before moving focus away from it.

2. Bring back testing. I know you want the devs to do testing, but after many, many years in the field, I can tell you with confidence that good testers will ALWAYS be better than great devs at finding issues and reporting/logging them. You are counting on users to find/log bugs, but they do it half-assed and often don't do it at all. That's the same with devs and even internal users who find bugs. I've logged many bugs that came back "won't fix," which leads to more bugs and more. After a while, you just stop caring about investing time in figuring out/logging an issue since it won't even be considered for a fix. ALL, yes, ALL bugs should be fixed. If you can't do this, then you can't and shouldn't be developing a major OS that the entire world uses. Step down at that point and let someone who can fix ALL the bugs take over. So sick of bugs... at work, at home, everywhere in all aspects of Windows. I have workarounds for basically every aspect of Windows, and it's difficult to remember them all the time.

3. Hire me as FTE. Haha. I would love that. Though I know it'll most likely never happen, it would be nice, and my motivation for making Windows OS the best it can be would be re-invigorated! Hard to want to make something better if you are just going to be laid off despite doing "great work" (multiple managers' words, not mine). Although, if nothing else changes, I still think the bubble will collapse, so this advice is more for you to only me.

4. Get rid of Edge. I dislike it; everyone I know dislikes it. Internally, it works half the time with our internal sites. I've lost hours of work because certain training would randomly restart on Edge, but then when performed on Internet Explorer, it worked fine.

5. Don't release products until they are finished. You would think that would go without saying, but it's not the case. Spend some time on polish and making it super stable. When did releasing before it was finished become the standard? Are we all just going to keep repeating these mistakes?

6. Make things consistent. I've seen some effort, but also seen more branch-offs that make content/product/etc., not consistent and forces us to adjust to different consistencies across the OS/Website/etc.

7. KISS... Keep It Simple, Stupid.