Microsoft

You're around very smart engineers from global teams working together.

There are a lot of genuinely hardworking, cooperative, kind engineers that make everyday work so much smoother and easier.

Good perks and generally calm atmosphere outside of your team (people are usually nice).

Pay is decent, less than other big tech companies obviously, but you get a better work-life balance as a trade.

Honestly, you're only here for the pay, the generally okay work-life balance compared to industry, and those good teammates who you will treasure.

A lot of older guard workers are resistant to improving the engineering process. PMs dominate the show at the cost of SDEs. You will be pushed to deliver buggy releases to angry customers, prioritize features over bug fixes, and then marked down for spending so much time on-call fixing the problems PMs pushed you to ship. There is no extra compensation or time-off for on-call, just pressure.

Build and deployment processes are slapdash and flaky. Expect to wait multiple hours for a build and deployment, only for a transient failure to require you to stay late and retry. Expect those failures multiple times per month.

The build and deployment process is filled with poorly maintained and poorly documented shell scripts.

There is a culture of rushed delivery and constant hotfixes, even worse if you're on a service team like Azure. You will not get extra compensation for all of this pressure, and the teams will stay understaffed.

There are a lot of "bad apples" distributed all over in high positions. Female employees might feel uncomfortable speaking up about their managers leering at their bodies, as I have. If spoken up about, little is done for years. There is covert racism if you're not white.

I was in a team under C+AI, and we kept losing people and couldn't retain anyone, despite being a crucial and visible part of the ecosystem. Why did people want to leave, and why did people keep getting burned out? We kept losing mostly senior engineers and keeping junior ones, and mostly losing women too. Even if it's not deliberate, you should ask why attrition and poor retention affected those groups the most.

Actually allow genuinely anonymous feedback where engineers can report concerns without their managers being able to take their words and de-anonymize them.

Managers frequently berate ICs (individual contributors) for giving negative feedback without speaking up non-anonymously about what to do about it. This makes ICs hide problems instead of reporting them.

Multiple times, we had multiple senior SDEs report concerns about maintainability of product launches before they happened, only for our skip-level manager to mention that not a single mention reached them at all. This speaks to the lack of influence individual SDEs have compared to managers and PMs.