Microsoft Reviews in Mountain View, CA

Pros

Technology breadth
Incredible culture
Best benefits package
Job stability

Cons

Microsoft mountain view or any non-headquarter-campus is very different from headquarters. Options are less and career growth is limited

Advice to Senior Management

Doing a great job in general but make sure you get the distributed development model right

Pros

Great way to get experience, learn, and get your foot in the door. They compensate well and my management team are not micromanagers, which is nice.

Cons

Contractors are treated differently and not included into the activities. This reduces overall morale and doesn't provide an environment where the contractor can give their best.

Advice to Senior Management

Need more open lines of communication with contractor or junior researchers, they may be able to help come up with solutions to problems from upper management.

Pros

Microsoft is a great place for career development. They are relatively quick to adopt new technologies and there are good opportunities to learn new skills on the job. They also have a great continuing education program with on site classes, and tuition reimbursement.

Cons

While they are quick to embrace new technologies, management could do more to accept and encourage innovation. While they do not say so, they are slow to even consider any idea that does not come from senior management. Additionally, senior management's ideas are not held to the same rigorous review process as ideas coming from non-managers. If a senior manager has an "innovative" idea, it gets done with very few questions asked about whether it's a good idea from a business or technology perspective.

Advice to Senior Management

Hold the same standard for new ideas coming from both management and individual contributors. An idea from senior management should have an answer for a business model and how it differentiates itself from the competitive landscape. Management should also consider a business model, competitive landscape analysis, and working prototype before dismissing it. Management should also encourage innovation first by being very open to new ideas, and second by providing support for innovation in terms of reasonable resources and flexibility.

Pros

A great place to learn a lot and grow Very talented people to work with. Easy to move across business units and even among career tracks.

Cons

very big organization, brings with it the corporate politics, could feel lost if working on a project that is not of much relevance to business or industry.

Advice to Senior Management

Management does a great job of communicating the changes and motivating the team. However, at times the work culture gets very formal with the upper management, specially when projects go across business units. Would be good to have a more open door policy and flat organization model to gets things done and identifying roadblocks quickly, with less bureaucracy.

Pros

Pay is really good if you've been there a while.
Benefits, vacation, sick time all generous.
Facility is outstanding.
Good opportunity to learn.

Cons

Politics are rampant in all groups
Lots of people collecting paychecks
Bullying wins over common sense
Advancement is limited unless you move to Redmond

Advice to Senior Management

Operations Management team -
Promote from within. The eBay management team took over and tried / failed at implementing a single architecture support org. Change doesn't happen overnight and you have to understand the group before you have yet another org change to cover up your blunders. Need a better model and get rid of the eBay groupies.

At higher levels don't base reviews on cross group collaboration when you choose what projects people work on. If you don't assign cross group projects you shouldn't be measured on this. Seems so obvious.

Product Development / QA / PM Management team -
You rock! Love the new structure QA / PM / DEV. Drives fast iterations and clear lines of ownership!

Microsoft Management -
Get better ways at evaluating employees. You have all this technology to understand metrics but don't apply this for employees performance. Divisional VP's seem out of the loop and middle managers are lost leaving IC's to wander. Get some accountability for the managers of managers and those commitments that you say are supposed to be open and passed around to be measured ... WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU FOLLOWED UP ON THESE?!?!

Pros

You can work with lots of smart hard work person.
You have lots of chance to work on project across different teams.
It has very established process of software development process.

Cons

Too big to change fast. Political issues everywhere.
Not all leads are good at management.
Development tools need to be improved.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to rethink the PM vs. Dev vs. Test organization structure.

Pros

Good perks. Free snacks/drinks. Nice campus in Mountain View. Plenty of parking. Challenging, interesting work. I had a good manager that looked out for me, but that may not be the case for everyone.

Cons

You will be the disdain of most of your geek peers. The wheels seem to be falling off lately. No incentive to innovate.

Advice to Senior Management

The whole business model needs to be reevaluated. Management is holding too tightly to the old cash cows. In order to innovate you have to give something up and make some hard decisions.

Pros

- Lots of opportunities to learn. This is especially good if you are just starting out your career
- Given a lot of individual responsibility unlike some other companies
- Depending on what you are working. the work can be rewarding as it will have a very wide audience

Cons

- Geeky and nerd culture is prevalent.
- You feel as if your whole life revolved revolved around Microsoft

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs to put its best brains into the web-based application and web-content fields so it can effectively compete against Google and the like. The paradigm shift towards Web-based computing is looking more and more possible especially for the average consumer. The workstation will always have its place but it may get limited and confined to professional use

Pros

Medical benefits are the best in the industry.

Cons

Career growth limited if you are not in Mountain View and Lack of creative problem solving. Politically charged environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Transparency - people are smart enough to know when they are being told a good story. The benefits of a good debate can improve organization and products.

Pros

The salary is awesome, there are tons of challenging problems to work on such that there is basically "infinite work" - you have to gauge yourself. The weather in CA is beautiful. Everyone that works here are incredibly smart and usually highly motivated. The software Microsoft sells literally changes the world!

Cons

Career growth is somewhat limited compared to what you could possibly achieve if you started your own company, which is what I want to do eventually. The anonymity of a huge corporation can lead some people to apathy, which can be annoying when you are working your ass off.

Advice to Senior Management

We need to speed up development. Our competitors seem to always be 1-3 steps ahead of us! Other than that, I am generally satisfied with managment.