Microsoft

Great, hardworking, and helpful coworkers. The people at Microsoft are what I enjoyed the most. However, this is greatly dependent on the department you're working in. Comparatively to other big tech companies, job security is better at Microsoft.

The focus on AI in recent years has completely changed the culture for the worse. Expectations are way higher, and employees are expected to output a lot more results because of AI. Work-life balance is practically non-existent now. There used to be a lot more morale events pre-pandemic. Recently, they forced employees back to the office with almost no incentive, reasoning, or morale budget. Morale is low as employees feel like they're on a death march in this AI war. Pay is not as much as the other big tech companies, which used to be fine with better work-life balance, but that is gone now.

There should be emphasis on improving your products, not adding AI everywhere just for face value for your investors. A portion of your users don't care that Copilot is integrated and care more that the products stay stale and features are halted because you're putting all your employees to work on adding AI. Stretching your employees for this goal that feels kind of like a death march is not the way to go, and yet you are not offering appropriate compensation.