Microsoft reviews

There is a closed club of people who have worked at Microsoft for over 15 years. Some literally grew up there and have never been exposed to other companies, cultures, leaders, or ways of working. Their views are therefore very closed, subjective, ignorant, and arrogant. Unfortunately they have often worked their way into people manager roles when they should have stayed individual contributors or left the company to broaden their mindset. Undermining, exclusive, and bullying behaviour are the norm within this group. Very difficult for new and experienced people to succeed.

-Annual review system forces bottom 20% each year to be eventually managed out of the company, making for an extremely stressful workplace -Microsoft appears to be in the process of laying off or otherwise turning over 20% of the workforce over the next 3 - 5 years -Technical skills acquired are Microsoft centric and not transferable to other companies -Performance ratings are too dependent on the immediate manager (leaving you at the mercy of manipulative managers) -The work environment is extremely political, requiring a lot of maneuvering to get ahead, and there is no teamwork -All product strategy is ultimately based on defending the Windows business, so there is no innovation (just being a fast follower) -All products are perenially focused on catching up with competitors to prevent marketshare erosion (e.g. Windows 8 to combat iPad, Office "Online" to combat Google Apps, Windows Server to combat VMWare, etc.) -Management is focused more on building empires for themselves, and not on doing the right things for Microsoft -Medical benefits will be severely cut back starting in 2013 (moving to Health Savings Account, etc.) -Base salary is not competitive with rest of tech industry -Stock has gone nowhere in 10+ years :-)