Microsoft

• Benefits are some of the best in the industry.
• Pretty stable job, if you're in the right org.
• Work with a lot of really smart people.
• Maker garages on campus for prototyping.
• A lot of potential to move around in the company.

Over the last 10 years, it went from a more personal feeling to completely robotic, and now something slightly less robotic. You feel very replaceable.

Satya's new culture and values sound great, but feel like they haven't made much inroads in the company. For example, we have hackathons now, where we're supposed to get a week off to work on something cool. Unfortunately, schedules don't account for this, so if you do the hackathon, you still have to meet your deadlines anyway. Since they already fill you to the brim with work, it's not a plausible activity.

Agile, but not really agile. There's a new agile movement going through the company, which is great! Unfortunately, leadership seems to still be operating in waterfall mode, so bottoms-up planning still needs to be done.

Not invented here syndrome is really hurting the company's productivity. Teams are so tied to homegrown mechanisms for shipping it takes forever. Open source is making inroads, but there will continue to be friction so long as people's reviews are tied to value delivered, and value delivered is usually measured by working software.

Seattle area housing market is insane. Most decent homes within a reasonable commuting distance start at $650k+. At current mortgage rates, you need 20% down minimum ($130k in cash), and many home sales come down to bidding wars with buyers paying all in cash or $100k over asking.

If you want to attract and retain world-class talent, reward your people what they're worth.

There's something broken with a review model that penalizes you for being average on a high-performing team (implying that everyone is adding more value than average), but rewards you if you are a rockstar on an average team, or if you're a perpetual fire-fighter.

This creates the situation where it's in the best fiduciary interest of the individual to find troubled teams to improve and be a rockstar in, rather than find a highly functioning team and grow with them.

Why would I go work for a high-performing team knowing that I will get rewarded less or perhaps managed out?