Microsoft reviews

You need Stephen Hawkins to explain your commission structure to you. Having worked in IT for many years I have never been exposed to a more overly complicated and unclear compensation plan ever. It is truly useless. Trying to find someone to explain to you what it means will be your first major challenge. Good luck you have been warned. You are just a wing nut on the side of panel on the side of bigger panel on the side of another panel etc etc. You are basically so far removed from decision making and being able to influence it forget trying to make an impact. It remains dictatorship and everything is geared up to be on Microsofts terms and not yours. The hiring process is truly tiresome. You may well find out at the end of it that the job you have spent months interviewing for might not even be signed off internally and then you get told well done you have made it but we have no job for you. Ask if has been approved before you waste your time. On boarding - mm what on boarding. Sort your own laptop phone etc...these can take days to arrive. There are some great brains internally but they seem grateful to be part of the cult that is Microsoft rather than changing the world. It is not a place for dynamic people who want to cut a deal and get on. I fear that too long in this world and you will be stuck. I am not ready to retire just yet. Probably some of the worst communication I have experienced within a company and quite possibly down to the fact that the people you are asking questions of do not know themselves. Many of the lifers at Microsoft refer to the good old days....good expense policies, fun, the good old days. Today to them and to me those days are long gone. The nice cars in the car park are driven by those Microsoft lifers with good share options rather than those smashing sales targets. It does feel like you have arrived after the party has finished. TVP reading is the dullest place I have ever worked. My advice is if you are looking to join here speak to a load of people you might know who have been here past and present before hand. I did and 80% gave negative feedback. I joined and then regretted it.

Note: Microsoft is <b>huge</b>, each department has its own culture and pros & cons, so a lot of the complaints below are specific to the Online Service Division or Bing Ads. - Management styles in Bing Ads are harsh to the point of being unrealistic. The leadership team is certainly competent, and we've made major improvements to both our product and business strategy since I started. However, they're prone to setting unrealistic deadlines and punishing people for failure regardless of whether that person had any control over the source of the delay. It's very difficult to ask for clarification of goals or explain why it's infeasible to implement the plan in the time allotted, because the manager will often dismiss the problem and imply you're stupid for asking. Their overall attitude is 'Make it work, or we'll find someone who will.' - MSFT's code base and bureaucracy are both huge and old (by tech industry standards). I recently wanted to change the text of a few links on one of our websites. It took three months to a.) identify the dev lead who owned the code (because ownership changed three times in three months), b.) identify the developer with access permissions to deploy the changes, and c.) get the new text approved by our cloud of business groups. In another case, it took a month to figure out which person had the authority to approve emails to customers. Both the people and the process needed for any given task change every 1-2 years, and the documentation is rarely updated completely or quickly. To be fair, the company has gotten much better about this in the last few years, but PMs still spend half their time tracking down the right person/system. - Engineering attracts a very distinctive personality type. Whenever you make a mistake, which will be often during the first several months due to the sheer amount of new information to process, people will point it out very bluntly. You can also expect to debate the details of essentially every decision. - There's an implicit assumption that if you're unhappy or can't met the goals set for you, you're just not smart/hard-working enough to make it at Microsoft. This creates an Emperor's new clothes situation where problems don't get fixed because everyone's afraid to report them.