* TL;DR: Microsoft is a boring, stodgy place that’s long-term career suicide for a talented, inspired young person. Satya is changing things, but not remotely to the extent the press narrative claims. Join Microsoft if you need a steady, boring job so you can raise a family — or if you don’t have better options.
Don’t come here if you’re genuinely excited about being part of the next wave of technological innovation, or if you care about being at a fun, cool place to work. This ain’t it. *
When you see positive Glassdoor reviews for working at Microsoft, you should ask whether the reviewer has actually worked anywhere else. Microsoft typically hires people right out of college, who don’t yet realize they’re getting a bum workplace experience relative to our industry peers. It’s not a coincidence that almost never will you meet people voluntarily departing a top-tier tech company like Google, Apple or Facebook to work for Microsoft — even though countless MS employees leave daily to these competitors.
Why is that? Microsoft has 4 major flaws for a young person excited about tech.
1. IF YOU ARE YOUNG AND INSPIRED, DOING MICROSOFT LONG-TERM IS CAREER SUICIDE.
Microsoft is a fine place to go for 3 years out of college to learn a new discipline - especially if you didn’t get the GPA to go straight to a top-tier tech company like Google or Uber.
But Microsoft is a terrible place to stay for the long term — unless you really just want to have kids, a suburban house, and just need a day job to pay for all that. Doing a long-term stint at Microsoft destroys your marketability: you will have to fight in every interview to prove that you can survive in the agile, autonomous, resource-constrained, Android/iOS environment that is the real world. Companies will assume the worst of you in every interview. When you’re ready to leave, it gets degrading fast.
Yeah, you ship Windows and Office to a billion people. Big impact opportunity, right? Well, McDonald’s ships about 2 billion hamburgers each year. Wouldn’t a job in McDonalds’ headquarters also be a big impact opportunity? And if your idea of innovation involves years of making incremental tweaks to the Big Mac recipe, or wasting 3 years of your life to bring some executive’s insane vision of a hybrid ice cream & chicken sandwich to market, sure!
And the financial buffer of working at a monopoly means you burn 3-5 years of your working life on a single preventable fiasco like Windows 8 or Vista, during which your Silicon Valley friends just had the time of their life and got filthy rich helping create Uber or Airbnb. Instead, you’ll be working on ridiculous projects that only make sense to Microsoft executives living in a suburban Redmond bubble. You will be the butt of jokes at parties with your college friends when you try to explain what you’re working on (“Wait, so it’s kindof like an iPad, but it has worse hardware specs, no software, it’s buggy as hell… and it’s more expensive than the iPad?”).
2. YOU DON’T GET TO MAKE A DENT IN THE WORLD.
At Microsoft, you really won’t change the world. Not a bit. You will waste months of your life trying to get organizational buy-in to do what would take days or even hours at a Silicon Valley startup.
Microsoft is not a company that goes out and makes things better for customers, just out of employees’ own passion or conviction. There is no love in the Microsoft workplace culture — it really feels like working at a fading monopoly whose primary mission is to figure out how to keep cranking out bucketloads of cash, in a new reality that no longer needs it.
This is what makes Microsoft such a boring and soulless place to work. You’ll find soullessness in the dull, corporate posters in the hallways, the bland workspaces, and the uninspired cafeteria food. And with the cloudy, dark skies making for dark and depressing open-seating workspaces (Microsoft’s last great perk of private offices is being phased out), it can sometimes feel like a real-life re-enactment of Apple’s “1984” commercial.
Microsoft does an amazing job selling interns on the company — amazing parties, food, concerts, free hardware, and lots of executive face-time. If you’re an intern, enjoy every moment of it. But remember that you’ll never get any of that once you work for the company — all you’re getting is a sales demo.
3. MICROSOFT IS A TRADITIONAL, HIERARCHICAL COMPANY
While tech companies are typically egalitarian and flat, Microsoft is traditional and hierarchical. This hierarchical workplace manifests in big ways, and in little ways.
In little ways, it just makes for a lousy work environment. In every e-mail you send, your job title and tenure rank (junior vs. midlevel vs. senior) appears at the bottom, so people can judge your ideas by your rank - just like the military. It means they serve the worst food of any tech company, since executives get personally catered meals and don’t have to eat the dogfood-quality lunches food themselves. And it explains why the shuttle service that takes you around campus is a time-sucking nightmare — executives have special “888” shuttles that actually work.
And in big ways, this means that if you have a great idea, you’re probably not going to get it into a product - unless it’s specifically your job or charter to do so. Microsoft doesn’t want you for your creativity - they want you for your ability to shut up and execute on other people’s (executives’) ideas.
In fairness, there are small improvements like the new annual Hackathon. Yes! For just a few days each year, your original ideas and your creativity are valued! But there are other companies where your ideas and conviction are valued every single day.
4. MICROSOFT DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU
Your immediate manager may care about you, but Microsoft as a company doesn’t. Microsoft won’t even do an exit interview when you quit. When you give notice that you’re leaving for a “competitor” (basically, any tech company worth its salt), you literally are escorted out the door. Your health care and paycheck is also terminated that very same day.
HR interview? Nope, you’ll receive a survey that you literally can’t even fill out — because it expires the moment your MS e-mail account shuts down (d’oh!). They literally don’t care why you left.
It sounds brutal, but Microsoft at its core is traditionally an unkind company. Until recently, they even required managers to give bad reviews to roughly 20% of their teams on a forced curve (“stack ranking”). When they ended this management practice, Microsoft’s leadership never even had the humility to acknowledge or admit that this was ever a bad idea or unjustly hurt employees.
Working at Microsoft also means you’re also stuck in Seattle. Competitors like Google let you work as an engineer in almost any exciting city in the world: New York, Munich, London, San Francisco - you name it, they have an office there. At Microsoft, well, you better love Redmond. At least it’s only a 45 minute bus trip during rush hour to Seattle.
While companies like Google lavish new toys and freebies on employees, Microsoft is dirt cheap with employees. The only “free” hardware I got was a junky Surface RT (promised by Ballmer to be ‘free’, but then we had to agree in writing that it was actually the company’s property and would be returned if we left), and a Windows Phone (which was only ‘free’ if we signed up for a nearly $2000 contract at the employee’s sole expense - despite the unambiguous promise Steve Ballmer made at the company meeting of a ‘free’ phone. And true to Microsoft, they never explained or apologized for not actually giving employees what they promised us - as an MS employee, you’re generally expected to just shut up and be grateful for whatever you get.)
Microsoft seeks to be a hardware maker, but offers marginal discounts to employees at best. You can get a better price on the internet for an Xbox or Surface. Whereas Apple gives employees $500 off a new Mac, Microsoft gives you nothing like that. Microsoft-logo’d clothing at the company store costs as much as actual fashionable major-brand merchandise at a major clothing store.
(This isn’t necessarily a problem, as a noteworthy sign of the company’s downward relevance is that almost nobody will ask you to buy MS discounted products anymore, certainly not compared to when I started.)
It just goes on and on.
Overall, Microsoft isn’t horrible - but if you’re a talented young person who wants to make a dent in the universe, don’t come to Microsoft.
