I almost never work nights or weekends, and on average work 40 hours or less a week.
On an established team, lower management is usually competent.
Perks and compensation are pretty good.
Hard work is usually (but not always) recognized and rewarded.
Workplace environment is quiet and spacious once you have a few years of seniority.
Microsoft isn't afraid to spend money on its employees, unlike some other rival companies.
Benefits were tripped a bit recently (mostly medical).
Not much faith in upper management and C-level executives.
As with many companies, visibility and loosely defined "impact and influence" are more important for performance reviews than actual performance.
Performance reviews can be interpreted as opaque, unfair, and subjective.
Focus more on retaining competent (not just rock star) employees, rather than just hiring externally. Otherwise, people will jump back and forth to get pay raises. Good for them, bad for the companies involved because of ramp-up time, loss of domain expertise, etc.
Get rid of the useless Principal/Partner and higher ICs and management. There are many good ones, but there are a lot of talkers/politicians as well. The longer they stay, the more the culture shifts to reward that behavior.
Pretty typical of what else is on here, but with a different twist. I met with three engineers and then the final interviewer, which they called the "as appropriate." Other questions were around linked list traversal and working with arrays and index
Overall, the interview process is professional. It started with a phone screen, then I flew to Redmond for an on-site interview. The team was quite interested in my past projects and asked for a lot of details. The coding questions were not very har
A friend from MS referenced me. A recruiter quickly reached out with an online screening test. After passing the test, I received an invite for an onsite interview. I had five 1-hour interviews onsite, all of which were one-on-one with different en
Pretty typical of what else is on here, but with a different twist. I met with three engineers and then the final interviewer, which they called the "as appropriate." Other questions were around linked list traversal and working with arrays and index
Overall, the interview process is professional. It started with a phone screen, then I flew to Redmond for an on-site interview. The team was quite interested in my past projects and asked for a lot of details. The coding questions were not very har
A friend from MS referenced me. A recruiter quickly reached out with an online screening test. After passing the test, I received an invite for an onsite interview. I had five 1-hour interviews onsite, all of which were one-on-one with different en