Microsoft

The benefits and pay are very good. Healthcare for you and your family is top-notch; you won’t find another company with better benefits. This isn’t too important if you are single, but as you begin to raise a family, the healthcare alone will keep you on board!

If you are passionate and work hard and smart, there are plenty of areas for advancement in testing, development, and management. Although you may need to jump teams, projects, or just managers, you can always find somewhere to grow.

The company promotes employee growth with goals and commitments you are held accountable for each year. They drive you to be your best and reward you for it.

You are surrounded by some of the sharpest and most talented people in the business at every turn. You’ll never stop learning from great people.

The company is big enough for you to move around to different products and fields. You often have your own office (no cube farms!). There is truly something for everyone here.

You get to live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Mountains, forests, mild climate (very little humidity). It’s one of the most beautiful areas in the country.

The most amazing R&D in the industry. The research fairs held once a year blow my mind!

• Like many high-tech areas, the high cost of living surrounding the company can be a drag. There seem to be a large number of retired “Microsofties” in the area. With their cashed-out options from the 80s and 90s, home prices went through the roof. Due to the geography (Lake Washington, Lake Sammamish, hills and mountains), there are fewer places to build homes. As a result, the demand versus the supply is very large. Home prices have stayed relatively high even through this past year’s market downturn. Generally, if you don’t have two full-time incomes in your household, you won’t be able to afford a reasonable or nice home; you’ll have to settle for a condo.

• Microsoft is always short on employees. This means your team will most likely be short of developers and test engineers, forcing you to work a little more and cut or postpone features. Psychologically, this can be demoralizing, especially when you are excited about and believe in your project. Employees move around often; you can never be sure if you’ll have the workforce the team needs to deliver features for the next version of your product.

• Microsoft generally follows the market and will hold off on creating a product until it’s clear there is a large demand and a clear business justification. As a result, we appear like a company of “Jonny come latelys.” Remember Microsoft Terra Server from the late 90s? Too bad it took Google Earth for Microsoft to realize what a great product this could become.

• Even though this is the most ethical, moral, and giving company I’ve worked for, Microsoft has the “Evil Empire” stigma. It gets old being approached and castigated by uninformed “lesser minds” that buy into the FUD.

• Microsoft creates software for business and industry first, and the consumer second. This is a wonderful business model, but at times it feels like you’re creating software for others, and not the software that you’d like to use yourself. There is always another company that needs you to tweak your product so that their 15-year-old, non-RFC-compliant application will work with it. YAWN!

• You must have true business justification for ideas and plans you’d like to implement. When you work on your own software in college, you create what you like. But in the industry, you can’t do things that seem “cool” to you. One simply doesn’t say, “Hey, let’s put a popup stopper in IE!” You’d have to show how it would benefit the bottom line for the company, or wait for another product to implement it and push MS for parity.

• Although we have the best R&D, I rarely see management with the foresight to put amazing ideas into our products. Sometimes it reminds me of Xerox in the 70s – amazing breakthroughs, but the powers that be don’t understand them. 75% of the “innovations” I see at Apple and Google were revealed years before at Microsoft Research fairs.

• They still haven’t supplied the company with free Zunes! :-) (Apple employees all received free iPhones!)

• Few female engineers. I’m told they were a species hunted to extinction around these parts.

Understand that software is more than just an engineering endeavor. It’s about wrapping brilliant engineering with a beautiful work of art. We have the engineering down, but we present it to customers in a tasteless way. Microsoft needs to hire someone at the top whose sole purpose is to focus on taste.