I keep seeing posts on here referring to bad culture at Microsoft, but I'm not sure what people are referring to. Has something changed over there in recent years? What? Softies, weigh in!
The cultures within Microsoft vary widely. I see a few things at play: 1. A large portion of the management has gotten there for reasons other than their people management skills. Often it’s their perceived individual impact / strategy etc. There are efforts to improve this, but you still have old habits. 2. What it takes to be successful beyond a certain layer isn’t clearly articulated and varies across teams. There’s a decent amount of subjectivity. 3. The company is going through cultural change. Many who were successful for year behaving one way are suddenly not. While it’s a good think to no longer value being an asshole for example, people don’t like the rules changing on them. 4. It’s a big company with a lot of legacy trying to modernize and behave like a startup. For many reasons some parts can’t. There’s tension between when to behave which way. 5. There are some “ways of doing things” in many of the orgs. There isn’t a solid on ramp path that teaches it. It creates and in crowd that knows. You need an in person to learn from. And it can make group inadvertently miss out on doing things better. This is blowing up a little with the changes happening. 6. There are still some political asshats in important positions. There aren’t many but a few powerful toxic people can do a lot of damage. 7. Leadership tries to get bottoms up thoughts but still wants top down control. This can cause confusion about decision making and add overhead. 8. Team funding is relatively ridged. Priorities across teams don’t often align. Buy-off and commitments are often needed at high levels for team collaboration. I’m sure I’m missing some, but those seem to be the patterns I’ve observed that lead to the bad culture views.
Spot on.
Amazons culture was worse when I worked there. Microsoft is pretty chill, except UST and MSIT, avoid both of those and you’ll probably land OK.
Msit is chill, it’s just that they are 5 years behind. Everyone there is obviously over paid for being 5 years behind.
Depends which org. Satya has made a big difference though.