Microsoft

Competitive compensation, job stability, work-life balance, high visibility products

Bad architecture due to Microsoft's unwillingness to do full rewrites. We end up building on top of badly designed software, which leads to further bad design decisions to make it work. Technical debt is ever increasing, which makes it feel like a losing battle. Product focus is on delivering new features in time to compete with AWS, at the expense of engineering quality.

Internal tooling is pretty awful. There are many tools that achieve the same functionality, and each team uses them differently. It makes engineering productivity extremely low. Senior engineers can overcome these mostly by building their own hacky tools.

We need more alignment in the engineering department. A monorepo would be a great addition. There's lots of friction with cross-team dependency because of bad documentation and bad architecture. If we had more visibility and control over other teams' work, cross-team collaboration could be improved vastly.