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Lots of opportunities, but lots of pitfalls too

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Microsoft for 6 years
January 15, 2019
Redmond, Washington
3.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Microsoft is a big company, and there are lots of different divisions working on different products. They have different cultures, and there's no end to interesting projects to work on.

You're encouraged to move around within the company to find a good fit--but you still have to go through a lengthy interview process with the new team each time.

Cons

Work/life balance seems to be slowly declining across the company.

There are no QA teams anymore in most places (because quality is the devs' responsibility), but it's rare to find a team that is willing to allocate enough time to actually write sufficient tests.

This makes it hard to write code at quality without just working extra hours.

The company is constantly reorganizing its hierarchy (about twice a year), leaving lots of projects in chaos.

I have many times had our successful product moved to another team simply because "it's not in our charter anymore."

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