I am being hired by a skip level manager at Microsoft who leads 5 teams at Bing. I asked her/him regarding team assignment and projects that I could be working on. Her/his response was "we hire for my entire team and not for a particular team in my org. Also, new hire will have flexibility to switch projects after he/she works on a project for a while". I have been working in the industry for about 2 years now and would like to aggressively choose the team + projects that align with my goals/interests. Is such a response common to hear? Or are they treating me as a new grad and hence such a response? Or is this a way to push shitty work onto new joiners? Level offered L60
Tell them you wont accept till they finalise the project details. You hold all the cards now
What they said may be true. A lot of teams at Bing have loops that are not team specific. The belief is that this policy makes the loop less prone to folks hiring their best friends or candidates who went to the same school, came from the same country, and etc. If you did not interview with a specific team, then yes, they also may not know your team assignment yet as that depends largely on team specific headcount. Secondly, they are correct in saying that you can move teams after a few months.
Thanks, that is very helpful context! Then probably better questions to ask are: Which teams have openings and what are on-going projects in those teams?
Unfortunately, I don’t work at Bing so I don’t have the info at hand either. I know of the policy through a colleague. You could try and ask the recruiter to give you a few options so that you can reach out to the HMs on multiple teams and start an informational with them to learn more about the scope of their team’s projects.
Many groups do this: centralized hiring for the reasons mentioned above and more. The assignment will be made on best fit basis (current need plus candidate background/interests). Typically such teams also do have flexibility in switching projects or changing assignments a couple weeks/months in after you learn more about the business. If you already know something about the org and have a preference, you should feel free to state that preference. Otherwise, you know, have an open mind and wait to get some actual on ground data (brief informationals IMO can only tell you so much).
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They haven’t decided where you are going yet chill the fuck out, probably will be a joint decision between skip and ems