HR Policy for University hires trumping actual real-qualification - Principal Software Engineer Microsoft Employee Review

3.0
Mar 29, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I think now that MS has real competition, it has sharpened its focus, has become more open minded and has broadened its willingness to consider new opportunities, risks, and models, even open source which was blasphemous back in the days of mR. ballmer. Glad to see Satya in charge (and ballmer long gone). Its a good time to consider MS!

Cons

Many things pop-up when you've been somewhere for decades, but one thing that I like to mention here is this HR policy, where even if you have years of industry experience, or even if you are technically qualified, yet you are treated as a college hire no matter if a hiring team might find you as fully qualified or not. Basically, hiring teams don't really get to see you in order to evaluate your qualification unless they have a req for a college hire. This means that you as a candidate have less opportunities since you are pushed into a smaller set of job-opening (and auto-rejected from industry-hire category), and you as a hiring team are being excluded from considering candidates that are technically qualified. This seems insane, policy trumps qualification! It was like this when I joined back the end of the last century! Crazy that such an irrational policy is still the HR mantra. I can whine about stack ranking and such, but many people have in the past, so I'll let it go.

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4.0
Jan 28, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. If you love tech, this is a great place. No doubt you'll talk tech (mostly the MSFT stack) from enterprise to consumer - from PCs to phones to Xboxes - from datacenter to desktop. 2. What were GREAT benefits are now VERY GOOD (took a small step down) but still probably better than you'll find at 99% of large corporations. If you've got family - the value of the benefits is even higher. 401k match is nice. 3. Even with it's struggles MSFT is still a cash printing machine. This means if you can keep your nose clean and do reasonable work, you can have a stable job, pay your bills, feed your family, and not worry (too much) about layoffs. The stock you own likely won't tank, but probably won't go up much either. You'll get a bonus each year and some stock. It's a decent life if you aren't looking to light the world on fire.

Cons

Brand on Your Resume: After many years of losing market share and struggling to be at the front end of innovation and the fact that there's 90,000 employees, don't think MSFT is necessarily going to be attractive on your resume to more agile and smaller companies. Managing Your Career: Make you say this out loud so it registers - 90,000 employees work there. Double that for vendors. It is VERY hard to "stand out" and move up in the company. Don't expect your manager to be much of an advocate or enabler to help you meet your career goals - they are basically trying to survive the stack rank every year too. Not familiar with the stack rank? Check out the 2012 Vanity Fair article called "Microsoft's Lost Decade".

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