Microsoft

I started at Microsoft a few months into the pandemic, and from day 1, I've experienced management as compassionate and committed to taking care of people as people.

Crunch has been rare on my team.

I work on a service large enough that I'm only the on-call engineer about once every 3 months.

Perks and benefits include a yearly reimbursement of $1500 for health and wellness items. Personally, I've used it to reimburse meal kits, a Peloton subscription, pet insurance, and a Massage Envy membership. The list is really expansive.

The average tenure at MS on my team is around 7 years. People stay a really long time because the philosophy is that they'd rather have you take a break than lose all the expertise you've gained. Being such a large company, the code bases are large, and the history is long on pretty much all the projects. The longer they keep you, the more valuable you become. More on that in the cons.

There's plenty of room to move internally when you're ready to do something different, and internal hiring is very common.

Specifically on coming out as transgender at Microsoft: My wife and I pay zero dollars for our health insurance and have a copay of $20 for any doctor in the Kaiser system. The trans healthcare is especially affordable – just $100 for any of the gender reassignment procedures. The waitlists are about 6 months for a transgender surgical consult, which isn't terribly short, but it's certainly worse elsewhere.

There's an internal transgender community that has worldwide members. They've been an incredible support and place to belong. Changing my name and pronouns has been completely painless. A lot of my team is virtual, and I've never been misgendered or deadnamed. I didn't even announce it beyond telling my manager and saying in my team chat, "Hey, I'm going by X now and updating my pronouns to Y," and everyone just said "great," "congrats," and started using it.

The main complaint I hear from people leaving Microsoft is that they want to make more money or get promoted.

As I mentioned in the pros, turnover at MS is pretty low by design. But that does mean that compared to other places, the opportunity for promotion and big raises is smaller as well. Generally, people either leave by year 2 or stay for 7 to 8 years at least. There are a lot of people who have been there for a very, very long time.

Also, good work-life balance and culture is the stated goal at Microsoft, and most teams seem to follow it, but not every team is the same.

There are a lot of different teams at MS, and reorganizations seem to be fairly common. Though it seems about the same as at any large company, not particularly bad here.

My team only just started doing sprints. For the previous year plus I've worked here, I've struggled without the framework of Agile that I'd become used to at previous workplaces. It's getting better on my team, and I know that's super team-dependent as well.

This is a great place to work, but only because I'm on a team with a good manager. Most managers seem to be good managers here.