Microsoft Reviews in Shanghai, China Area

Pros

Excellent enviroment, smart and nice people,

Cons

Process is pretty heavy sometime overwhelm

Advice to Senior Management

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Pros

for professional work style, it is a good place to go to.

Cons

stressful environment and management may show more respect to employee

Pros

Deep and new technology
Transparent and efficient
Work & Life balance

Cons

The company is too large, code base too large

Advice to Senior Management

are we over driven by the market and statistics?

Pros

very good tech
high quality products
smart people
that is the three attributes that keep me in MS

Cons

the team where I'm in is too number focused (even not result focused). The number really drives me crazy. Those numbers in many angles do not fully reflect the actual business situation and it actually can hurt the company and also employees

Advice to Senior Management

think beyond just number

Pros

Company is politically very matured, in terms of all details in policies, activities, learning resources, caring for people, etc
Company cares people very much: strongly supports work/life balance, advocates 20% office hour in courses learning, provides top-level resources such as gyms, shuttles, snacks, campus environment etc
Company is very famous and people are respected/admired by outsiders
Company has a unique position "Program manager" which other companies don't have: it's a lowest level position same with SDE, but it strongly develops people's soft skills -- inter-personal skills, think bigger, manage teamwork, improve product life cycle, etc.-- a really great position to gain growth rapidly!

Cons

A myth here is, PM, Dev and Test are "3 pillars". In fact PMs are the most important one here -- they're half the leadership team. They're also under the most workload. Devs are the most cost effective -- least workload, mild-paced promotion. Tests are the most tedious and of the most workload, and least participated in strategic discussions in all.

Being in such a monster company, no one has high efficiency -- sometimes >50% time is spent to handle ugly labor cases such as upgrade, side by side, security, backward compatibility, etc; many bugs on >10 year C/C++ codebase need to be fixed before being able to write in C#; huge external dependencies on other timezoned ares (typically Redmond) are painful, you have to mail them a question and get reply tomorrow, then you modify your question the day after -- typical global-scoped work is as slow as crazy.

But the worst thing is the shabby manager level. As a 3/4 year old campus, most managers and leads are less than 3 year in microsoft, most of them are Chinese industry hires from companies not comparable to Microsoft; thus they share a common serious problem, lack of leading abilities and real insights. A bunch of mediocre leaders are ruining the great dreams of excellent 1-from-1000 engineers.

Advice to Senior Management

There's an old saying "a bad soldier is only one bad; a bad general is the whole army bad". If you keep hiring poor leaders and managers like today's, there's no hope for you to look upon.

Pros

Freedom, Happiness, coding, good work condition

Cons

Not enough salary package in china

Advice to Senior Management

Improve the salary package

Pros

Customer service skill can improve

Cons

Work pressure is much high than other IT

Advice to Senior Management

work and life balance

Pros

1. A big company which is making great product
2. Good oppurtunities to transfer across different department

Cons

1. Two many testers and program managers. It wastes two many engineering resources
2. Release cycle is a little longer than other internet company, the development is not agile enough

Advice to Senior Management

I think Microsoft should pay much more attention on Mobile platform, since the market share is far less than its competitor(Apple and Google). Also cloud computing is an essential area to the success of the company in the future decade

Pros

Good benefit and pay overall compared to other companies at China, well, not Google or any other Wall Street companies
A bunch of smart people to work with

Cons

Not all the people lives from the survivor test
Over aggressive
You have to be lucky enough to have someone(your managers for example) to care about your career development

Advice to Senior Management

Spend more time on employee career development
Less politics
The managers do not stick together too much, same thing applied to between HR and managers

Pros

People, a lot of experienced people to learn from
Work, the work is challenging, some work groups are fun

Cons

A lot of innovative things are wasted, not fully used

Advice to Senior Management

Review past achievements, find business value out of it, make full usage of products/technologies