Obligatory TC: offered TC 108/50/15, current TC 0 (student) Got an offer for this group a while back (already accepted for various reasons). I’m wondering about the WLB and prospects with the group? I read some posts on here from a while back that the cosine part (Core OS) is slow, too political, dying/stable/low-growth, etc. My position is “data & applied scientist” (new grad from masters), and I’m pretty sure Masters level usually doesn’t touch AI/ML and is mostly analytics or data engineering type work, but how come some masters grads in this same position at MSFT have some bullet points under their current job like “built random forest machine learning model to meet abc objective”? Or are they just embellishing because building a random forest model really isn’t rocket science? My friend works as a data scientist in MSIT/Core Services and sometimes he gets a task like manually cleaning large datasets, which sounds awful. But then other people on Blind have said that the data scientist position at MSFT follows the same levels/pay structure as SWE and is basically interchangeable?
Negotiate stocks, they can go high up to 120k. Negotiate sign on the recruiter itself can approve upto 25k. Base won’t change. Low ball offer. Cosine wlb is good within the role/org you’re mentioning. Mainly involves building powerbi dashboards, Windows Watson Analysis, azure kusto telemetry analysis and monitoring. It’s a fun role to start with. Don’t expect to build you’re own lstm neural net lol.
I am a junior level ML Scientist at msft. (1) Negotiate both the stock and the signing bonus. I got 120k stock, 30k signing + 5k relo, but I had to negotiate hard and did not end up signing until the day before the offer was due. If you have already accepted, this may not be an option. (2) Personally in my team, I get to work with a range of things. I do both machine learning work (extracting features, training models, evaluating results), as well as build the production infrastructure for the new models to be deployed. I do get to work with our Pytorch code pretty closely, my manager is supportive in having me take on more of those sort of responsibilities, despite me only having a Bachelor's.
Ah ok thanks for the insight. I was hoping the role touched ML since they asked me a lot of ML related questions like gradient descent, write backprop on the whiteboard, etc, and my masters is in AI. I just hope I don’t get put into a Analytics-only role, but I’m not sure how much of a say I have rn so maybe I’ll try to transfer later if that’s the case. Just curious, did you have competing offers when negotiating? Or was it just based off of merit, e.g. returning intern or advanced degree or similar
I had one competing offer from Domino's, which wasn't even competitive with msft. I didn't mention to msft recruiters any of the offer details, just told them it was a smaller company in a different location. Nevertheless, it worked.
Embellishing more than likely. Microsoft keeps a lot of headcount around doing dubious work. But you can transfer out to a team more to your liking without any trouble.