Microsoft

Linear growth stagnates high-potential employees, preventing them from growing at the same pace as less ambitious colleagues.

Way too many PMs and not enough Engineers. This leads to multiple verticals introduced in the same product but no consistency or connection between these verticals.

Prioritization of tasks is a joke. There could be an issue impacting 1M+ users, but they'll put priority on fixing an issue or creating a feature that the PMs or leadership team want to pivot towards because they think it will have impact (it literally never does). They don't use user studies correctly or even acknowledge customer feedback, which leads to important customer-requested features being in massive backlogs.

Engineering quality isn't impressive at all and is easily noticeable in product performance, product bugs, service outages, and even internal tools.

Engineering teams are underfunded, so there is always work to do and not enough time, which leads to scope creep and delays in shipping features or bug fixes.

Build systems are a constant work in progress, and policies are continually being added, which brings down development velocity.

The hiring bar has definitely dropped, and some of the new grad hires are questionable.

Pay is less than the industry standard, and engineering is underfunded. So, it makes a lot of sense when they report earnings every quarter because they're understaffed on the engineering front and still underpaying engineers.