Microsoft Reviews
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Pros
It's an industry leader, with stability and great health benefits. There are some very good people who work there (though not enough).
Cons
Everything is date focused and quality takes a back seat. Then, when quality problems rear their ugly heads, management doesn't have any ideas except to put the team in death marches. That's not management. There's no long term focus, at most they think one year out and don't focus on improving quality or productivity.
Advice to Senior Management
Start building and keeping good teams, focus on quality and productivity. The dogs are all nipping at your heels, you can't stay ahead of the competition unless you are more agile and focused on true productivity enhancements.
Pros
Flex time, telecommuting, I had a great manager who understood need for challenges. The division I worked for was an awesome bunch of people who liked to party.
Cons
Too much silo'ing, not enough information sharing between teams. Fear of layoffs and merging of IT groups caused people to withold information.
Advice to Senior Management
Recongnize that IT professionals need to be exposed to more than a subset of technologies to remain challenged, and change the silo'ing.
Pros
* Big company means lots of career opportunities.
* Great benefits program for you and your family.
* Depending on the Team, work/life balance is possible.
* Lots of smart people to work with and to compete against.
Cons
* Big company means lots of process and/or repetitive process.
* Loyalty factor is blemished given Microsoft claims economy is impacting them and laid-off strong performing employees with companywide job eliminations. This in turn puts a permanent blemish on their loyalty factor for those working or thinking of working there in the future.
Advice to Senior Management
Please do a better job of promoting all the great products you make. And thank you for finally rebranding with "Bing" instead of "Live Search"! If you can just get rid of the rest of the "Windows Live" branding, you may clear the fog that confuses everyone about your offerings, which includes the employees themselves.
Pros
Microsoft is a great place to work and has a very well defined process to get things done to ship products. Feature work is tracked and scheduled just like all other work. Dev, Test and PM work together to deliver a feature to the product and eventually - customers.
Cons
There seems to be a lot of process involved when getting things done. If you're not a fan of proess, then this may hinder your productivity. However, every group/team is different.
Advice to Senior Management
Please make Windows Mobile a more complete and comprehensive package for our customers. We are starting to lag behind in Mobile.
Pros
Best benefits package know
Pride in company and corporate citizenship
Cons
unclear promotion guidelines
not enough information sharing, resulting in reinventing and too many processes
Advice to Senior Management
standardize management excellence across company to avoid perception that level of management satisfaction "depends on what group you're in"
Pros
The brand name Microsoft is huge! There are very few such names that one gets to work with. Also, there is a place for almost any speciality in MS.
Cons
The review process is not great. Managers are the be all and end all and if you dont get along with your manager, you can forget abt the review. The peer feedback and the customer feedback just does not matter.
Advice to Senior Management
They should start taking into account the peer and customer feedback on the employee. The review process should not pit one employee against another, Its just ridiculous.
Pros
Great benefits, good work life balance
Cons
Large company bereaucracy makes it difficult to move quickly
Advice to Senior Management
Get act together in the bay area campus. Lack of coherent strategy has allowed competitors to grab a strong hold on internet based applications This will be a key area for the company to survive and grow in teh next 10 years
Pros
1. Working on hard problems that impact people's lives.
2. Benefits, especially 100% medical coverage.
3. Great training program.
4. Management assigns a task and gets out of the way allowing me to do it how I feel is best.
Cons
1. It is a big company and many times politics is just as important, if not more so, than the validity of the project.
2. Hearing people talk about how much the products suck gets old.
3. A feeling that change happens to slow to keep up with the market.
Advice to Senior Management
Integrate products so people can use them together. Why WMP and Zune client? Online people are out of touch with reality. However, I live Bing and believe it is a step in the right direction.
Pros
Working with smart and focused professionals on interesting technology
Cons
Lack of work/life balance. Too many "death marches". Agressive people with egos tend to drive milestones and program goals.
Too many projects that are "me-too" and duplicate other companies success stories. (E.g., iPod -> Zune, iPhone -> WinMobile, etc)
Advice to Senior Management
Show more appreciation to workers who want a life along with a job.
Pros
Good salary. Good guys. Good environment to work.
Cons
Treated less important market to be invested. many duplicated or unintegrated projects exists which generates slowness, inefficiency in the results comparing with the competitors. There are many managers who are not decipline enought or should not have been a manager... The innovation never happens from Japan, other reagions but Redmond.
Advice to Senior Management
Got to be more strategic and proffesional enough to say loud to Redmond
