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A good, but not great, company

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Microsoft for 6 years
April 15, 2018
4.0
RecommendsNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

• Myriad of potential products and career paths • Incredibly smart people • Relative stability • Work/life balance • Lots of learning resources (books, courses) • New CEO has definitely helped galvanize people and slowly embrace positive change

Cons

• Isolated, centric, and not-invented-here mindset. • Country club – lots of antiquated people just "resting and vesting". • Insane politics: Everyone will try to take credit for, and steal, the coolest projects from hackathons. • Good enough compensation and benefits, but far, far from other big tech players. • So-called diversity forced quotas can result in forced diversity hires, token employees, and the like. • Silly approach to increasing the bottom line: it's always a coin toss whether you'll be axed during the next RIF. • Cronyism, lots of it.

Advice to Management

Promote transparency on policies.

Stop trying to savagely save money. Leverage your army of incredibly smart people to create cool stuff instead of trying to keep zombies alive.

Come up with mechanisms to reward and promote the smart and motivated people, instead of the ones whose only achievement is stealing spotlights.

Be honest and humble on compensation and benefits. Stop with the Kool-Aid. Why is there such a difference compared to other big tech companies?

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