Microsoft reviews

Engineering teams are run by Principal Engineering Managers, who essentially do what they feel like with the product, with a complete disregard to processes , practises , roadmaps, backlogs , customer wants - basically any feedback that doesn't impact their appraisal. Agile is a joke, you are lucky if a developer so much as tests what they have coded. The randomest things get the highest priority, cuz it catches the whims and fancies of the EM. Any questioning the code quality might just result in a PR review request to the PM. Most EMs cannot hold their ground in front of aggressive engineers because this impacts their manager rating. This leaves product managers (lets call them that cuz that's what they are irrespective of the program title we slap on them) to take the blame for pretty much anything that is beyond what they can handle. Managers may be technically sound individual contributors but lack leadership ability (apart from the trait that makes you suck up and grow up the career ladder) . The rule of the thumb us convenience - if the ask is out of our comfort zone, let us pretend we got confused and did not understand it correctly. Or let just call it a new requirement. There is zero sense of ethics, of doing the right thing for the product or even for the customer. Inclusion, respect are words we write in our appraisals and put on our event hoardings for better PR. From the inside, we are as hollow as we can be. In my experience as a PM, this is the worst company I have worked for. There is zero support system for doing the right thing. Everything works on manipulation, coercion and how you can stay in the good books of engineering managers, irrespective of your function (even if you are an HR)

As you move up in ranks, the pay disparity between Microsoft and its competitors (Google, Amazon, Facebook) starts to grow, with Microsoft developers making substantially less than their counterparts. For some, this is okay if they value lifestyle more than career progression. For others, it's common to jump ship to another company. As with any other big company, there's layers and layers of bureaucracy. For most mature teams, all work will be carefully planned months in advance, specced, discussed in multiple team meetings, with dedicated PMs and testers. In the beginning this is good because it teaches the absolute best, gold standard way to develop large software. After a while, it can become very dull and repetitive though. The annual review system, which invariably involves peer feedback and encourages backstabbing peers, can be maddening. Even after spending several years here, most people will find it's hard to break off of the railroaded promotion system and really shine as a superstar, just due to the seniority-based culture and siloed nature of the work (you don't have the expertise to move into a management role or more technical area that's already being done by someone more senior, but by never doing that role you'll never build expertise). Also your experience is hugely, hugely team dependent. Local team culture matters way more than anything that happens at top management level. Two employees at two different teams can have drastically different lives. Maybe the things I list as pros are actually cons in your team, and vice versa. Unfortunately there's no real way to tell what it'll be like working on a team until you actually start working there. You can gauge the number of young vs old developers to get a sense of the culture though. Despite this Microsoft is still a fantastic company, no regrets after having worked here for 6 years. The opportunity to work alongside world-class engineers to ship code that all modern versions of Windows use has been a privilege.