Microsoft Senior Software Engineer reviews

That forced stacking is insane! Basically you have a team of 10 people,and by the end of a quater,the manager has to decide who to fire relative to all other people in your team. Even if all are performing good job, still somebody has to get a bad review. Guess what that does to team work? Nobody wants to help anybody with anything, everybody tries to screw somebody else over. Horrible!

The sense of repression and fear is intense. People who have every reason to believe they are in good standing are terminated for obscure reasons. Innovative ideas are regarded as challenges to authority. Most of all, the company is obsessed with standards and uniformity and the standards are useless, counterproductive, often idiotic. Coding standards for example require illegibility, prescribe incoherent and inefficient practices, and demand useless extra work e.g. Unit test cases for components where they are inapplicable. The innovative atmosphere of the late 1980s is completely gone. Where once people worked until 8:30 PM because they loved what they were doing, they now work until 11:30 because they're terrified of their next annual review. Strangers to their families, stressed, exhausted, with 20 hours of recurring meetings every week. Project planning is driven by competition between fiefdoms, and lurches from one bad idea to another.