Microsoft

Pay, Free time, Good location

Bad senior management. Otherwise, I agree with the sentiments expressed by a fellow employee.

"If you're a technologist and can't get hired directly into a research group, you really don't want to work for Microsoft today.

Microsoft has suffered horribly since Ballmer took over. He's a marketer.

He was always the guy who'd come stomping down the hallway going, 'I WANT WHAT I WANT.' We'd explain that the products couldn't actually do that, and the reaction would be along the lines of, 'AND WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?'

If it was important, we'd take the technical facts to Bill, and Bill would intervene and shut him down. It was a decent balance of power.

Ballmer's drive to do the impossible would get Bill to do things he wasn't inclined to do, but only if they were possible.

Yes, there was a time when I loved Microsoft and worked with great enthusiasm in that niche of the 'not technically impossible.' I did a lot of risky things, knowing that I could always count on Bill to rein things in when I could prove they weren't technically possible, or so difficult they simply weren't practical.

But Bill is gone now.

Since taking over, Ballmer has promoted other similarly-minded marketers around him, so now he's completely cocooned in layers of marketing fluff with absolutely no basis in reality. He doesn't know the difference between an actual product and a picture of a product.

And just to improve the whole customer-focus and employee-focus thing, he's imported old IBM (Kevin Johnson) and legacy Wal-Mart (Kevin Turner)."

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