Microsoft Reviews in Dublin, Ireland Area

Pros

You'll learn a lot especially from technical area, a lot of challenging tasks and a level of expected quality is quite high. They also really expect you to deliver at the deadline, so pressure is high but it might push you above your limit. If you want to learn there are a handful of resources and smart people to learn from. Also engineers get a lot of freedom in a way they accomplish their goals, it's mostly delivering them that counts, not the path you select...

Cons

It’s mostly delivering that counts, so some people don't care that much about quality. There don't seem to be a good mechanism for (technical) quality validation. Again this is a very large company and things probably look different in other teams, especially in states when they do all really important stuff. There is also this weird culture, where people are mostly concerned about who will look bad on end year review and not taking any risks to help others, if it might make them look bad.

Advice to Senior Management

Do something to make cross team collaboration work better. Maybe the review system should reward the best without necessary throwing worst to the wolves at the same time. Less bureaucracy, more power to the engineers.

Pros

Great package
Great communication from senior managers
Good work life balance

Cons

Too much bureaucracy
Takes too long too grow your career
It seems to be more about length of service than talent

Advice to Senior Management

Speed up product improvements and cut down the number of meetings.

Pros

great atmosphere, senior management cares about their teams, the communication flow is also very good, management is very supportive

Cons

each team is like a small company with its own budget, which makes it very hard to get a higher position, be better trained

Advice to Senior Management

motivation can be an issue - its worth to work on that

Pros

Opportunities to learn and grow

Cons

Institution and connecting with outside Microsoft

Advice to Senior Management

Diversity is important. Experience and diversity comes from many walks of life is important. Take people out of their comfort zone and immerse them in the lives of business worldwide

Pros

compensation and benefits are good. met good people there. social life is good. facilities are good. canteen is good. pretty much everything except for the actual job is good.

Cons

political, corporate, little opportunity for advancement unless you're a player.
Employees are valued for how much they suck up to their manager and get elevated based on how political their manager is. You can be a stellar employee and go unnoticed if you're manager isn't a player. If he or she is, the sky is the limit.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to break down the politics to let real talent shine through to lift Microsoft out of its current torpor.

Pros

Work for a global company that makes a difference.
Work on new technologies.
Good compensation package.
Competitive salary

Cons

Little chance for advancement.
Incompetent Middle and upper management.
Poor recognition for going beyond the call of duty.
False work life balance policy.
Get bored doing the same job with no chance of moving up/over into a new role

Advice to Senior Management

Stop allowing teams to manage them selves. Take charge. Without leadership, teams will get standard work done, but will never get bandwidth to perform stretch goals and targets to add real value.

Clear out the dead weight. there are a lot of middle management ( level 60-64) who were promoted during the good times, when they did not have to work hard to show real results. now that times are tough they just do not have the skills to manage teams and provide results, and it is the sub ordinates who suffer. microsoft loses many excellent employees as management don't have the ability, in any way to help employees reach their potential. They just want you to do you daily job without question, and without bothering them with any issues. they do not want to help you free up bandwidth to work on value add projects. they do not want sub ordinates moving around, as the management have no real system knowledge, and are lost once their subordinates leave.

Staff are willing and ready to work beyond the call of duty for microsoft, but without aid from their management, its not possible. Its in part due to the the dead weight of incompetent middle management that helping to drag the once majestic Microsoft to the bottom.

90% of the middle managment i deal with do absolutely nothing except send out one or two long mails per day that are just summaries of work lower workers do, summaries that the managers themselves do not understand. An outlook rule could replace most of these managers.

Pros

not much to say here except flexi work hours. all perks are over rated. . . . . .

Cons

blame blame blame. no one takes responsibility for anyhting. how ever shouts loudest gets there way. . . . . .

Advice to Senior Management

they need to listen a bit more. management are totally disconnected with the real world. strategic direction is so far removed for the real world.

Pros

It is a great company to work in if you are passionate about technology.
I found very nice people .

Cons

This is a very large company , so it is not always easy to find the right space and role.

Advice to Senior Management

Difficult to give advice. Somebody says the company grew too big, and certainly there has been mistakes, but I think they are right trying to cover all aspects of the IT world.

Pros

It is a big company with lots of opportunities. You have lots of options for advancement in a wide range of areas, ranging from buisness to operations to finance to ...

Microsoft also do a very good job of hiring smart, competent people. I work in the European Operations Center in Dublin and I can honestly say that everyone I work with does their job well and has a good attitude towards their work. This is a refreshing change from some other places I have worked.

Cons

All areas of the company are totally budget driven with lots of money at the start of the fiscal year and none for the last quarter

Advice to Senior Management

Business-speak is not the same as knowledge of how to run a business. While most managers are very good, ALL managers have to be completely fluent in even the sillier aspects of business-speak

Pros

Being surrounded by great people, great process, and inundated with "Best Practice" causes you to learn in a year what it would take 3-5 years to learn anywhere else. You also have the ability to have a huge impact in your customers/ your company and most manager's I've had are very hands-off which also helps you to help grow. Working in an environment where there is constant change is stressful at first but helps you to learn to deal with change; a skill that is useful for the rest of your life.

Cons

Work/Life balance can be a problem, depending upon the role. The compensation and benefits package in non-US subsidiaries is sub-par compared to the US Sub (especially the health care package). The tools and business practices are not standardized between the US and non-US subs either. The MS Performance system claims to be based upon metrics and to eliminate favortism, but when all is said and done, your manager will argue for you in the "Calibration meetings" if he/she likes you, and lesser-so if they don't. Favortism and the "good 'ole boys" club is alive and well; both in performance reviews and hiring. The focus on performance metrics has caused FAR too many people to lose focus on what is best for customers and the company; everyone is busy trying to check off items for their performance reviews and inflate their metrics instead of providing cusotmers with better products and services. The combination of the focus on metrics vs. what is right and the fact that many teams are geographically distributed and never physically see each other causes the team dynamic to break down and causes a lot of back stabbing. In a nutshell there's too much of a focus on individual performance vs. team performance.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Change the performance system to focusing on team performance and big-picture "doing what is right" vs. individual metrics that are too rigid to apply to everyone in particular role. (Make sure that the metrics that exist benefit the company and are weighted appropriately; no official weighting today.)
2. Standardize bus. practices and tools across all subsidiaries; make salaries and compensation packages more similar between subsidiaries.
3. Just get rid of all the mandatory meetings, and training, and broken processes and tools; focus on allowing employees to be productive vs. "hoop jumping" all the time.
4. Institute mandatory controls that make the review process more transparent. Employees should know about the collaboration meetings, when they occur, who is representing them, and what was said on a quarterly basis. Internal corruption via favortism needs to be prevented.
5. Realize (and quickly) that the "Enterprise provides product pull-through at home" has been flipped "on its head" and that now, what customer's use at home influences what software they want to use at work. We need to focus RAZOR SHARP on the end consumer, developer, and systems administrator and their needs and not just the need of "the enterprise". The "long tail" that exists with the home user community creates more financial opportunities from scale than the largest of enterprise contracts can.