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Trying to modernize, but still "old school"

Software Development Engineer II
Current Employee
Has worked at Microsoft for 2 years
January 25, 2015
London, England
3.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

The pay and benefits are above average.

Flexibility to work from home and flexible times.

Lots of smart people and experiences to learn from.

Lots of divisions and opportunities to work in different projects.

Cons

Still a "rock-star" culture, where vocal/connected people take clear advantage (sometimes over the work of more skilled but less loud colleagues). Little team collaboration.

Still a "bubble" culture: whatever exists or you have done outside MS doesn't mean anything.

"Old thinking" in most seniors/leads, with practices and methods that have been scrapped more than a decade ago (e.g., waterfall, lots of planning and documentation).

Too many managers, many outdated (above), others totally clueless about the skills for their work (e.g., test leads that don't know unit tests and CI).

Little autonomy for individual contributors (every single technical decision must go through managers).

Advice to Management

Satya seems to have a clue and move the company towards the right direction. Scrapping the stack-ranking was also positive; however, there is still a lot of "old culture" built over the years.

Reduce the bureaucracy, get rid of the countless middle managers that hinder the renovation of the company, and empower the employees so they can use their expertise together with modern methods and tools in software development.

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