Anyone from MS Azure - Cloud and Enterprise?
Anyone here from this group? What’s the culture like? I am sure there are many internal groups, but I see a lot of career opportunities on MS site and was wondering how it is to work there?
Core Azure is a decent place to work. Met great folks on Azure storage and other core teams. Lots of the other parts of C+E are shit shows. Legacy dusty shit with legacy dusty folks trying to turn it into the next “cloud thing” with no actual planning, knowledge, or understanding. Stay the hell away from that stuff, basically anything that’s an existing box product trying to transition to the cloud. And stay away from anything under James Philips. He has no clue about software as far as I can tell.
what is C+E? And what about Azure Compute team?
Cloud and Enterprise. Azure Compute is a core team which means a lot of work to do. I don’t see quick promotion though. But there are a lot of folks moving to other companies with good compensation thanks to the experience they gained at Azure compute - Facebook, Oracle, Amazon and Alibaba to name a few.
Apply at Google instead their cloud & team is more competent and will leapfrog Azure over the next 3 - 5 years...
The answers here are accurate. One difference based on personal experiences - there is good growth at junior levels too. Yearly promotions till you reach level 62 are common in many teams and internal orgs. The work is fast paced and there isn't a lot of legacy code compared to other places in Microsoft. On the flip side, a lot of folks have been promoted to high levels who are better at quickly starting and delivering 'services' startup-style but bad at long-term quality, and maintainability. The management has realised this and internally Azure has been focusing on fixing this as a P0 the last few semesters.
The promotion is mostly done to prevent these people from moving to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. But the people, who could move, have already moved. The people, who couldn’t or have been paid enough for now, have not.
Agree. I'm moving out next month too. Entry level pay is competitive with other companies but MSFT significantly underpays compared to other companies at mid to senior level.
I just joined, it’s my first week. It’s been AMAZING. The amount of tech in azure is astounding, close to AWS. Culture wise, it seems great, but granted, i have only been here 3 days. I interviewed at google, and the poster above me says they will leap frog in 3-5 years. 5 YEARS!? In cloud!? That’s 100 years in normal time. That’s crazy, I have a hard time seeing how google will catch up. What they have is awesome as far as big data and analytics but that’s about it. I was extremely frustrated when doing the interview with the lack of options I had to deploy my solution I had to demo.
I’m level 64 btw
One thing while joining is to make sure you are in real Azure team and not something very peripheral.
What are some peripheral Azure teams?
How it is to work in some services team under Azure Compute?
Azure is a big group. Think of it as big as Windows or Office group if not bigger. Current CEO used to be the executive there. Basically Azure is treated like it is the future of Microsoft. You can feel like you are in a place to be. This also means you cannot enjoy the usual country club culture. When you meet with Windows people, you will feel like you are working twice as much. It is not as busy as AWS but surely busier and more work than any other groups at Microsoft. If you are an engineer, you should expect you will be in on call rotation. You may find easy team but generally expect to work lots of hours with occasional weekend work and night time calling from others for help in troubleshooting. Cloud is 24 hour business. Less down time is critical hence there is added stress for pushing a bug to production and you will feel adrenaline pumping when system goes down which happens regularly and can be stressful. Lots of upward opportunities if you are a senior person. Less for juniors.
Does anywhere at this damn company have opportunities for juniors? Fuck I wish I hadn’t come here. Every damn day. Stand there at standup and listen while principals suck up every shred of remotely interesting work while I fixed a couple trivial bugs and deployed some stuff. This place is killing career. I wish I had stayed at amazon. The number of opportunists there was insane compared to this top heavy country club shithole.
Chances are those principals aren't actually doing much work.