Microsoft Promote IQ - Engineering Org Culture Insider Info

I've seen several postings asking about the culture in the Engineering organization at Microsoft Promote IQ. I am a member of the organization and can provide prospective employees some inside information. The engineers in the organization are very good and on the whole are good collaborators and very knowledgable. However, the culture is often described by engineers in quiet moments of honesty in one word - toxic. The management in backend teams is not at the level of professionalism one would expect from Microsoft. Observations that many engineers share based on their experience are: The culture is defined by a top-down, command and control structure. The managers in backend teams do not provide the resources leads need to run projects, but do like to get involved in implementation details in an ad-hoc and fly-by-night manner. There is no real autonomy. The managers seem weak and ineffective in shielding the team. They behave as if they lack trust in the engineers. One of the potential benefits;/promises of PIQ is that it is a startup within Microsoft. Thus, the benefits of a growing startup and the benefits of a big company should be reaped. However, the top-down and autocratic culture prevent this potential from being fulfilled to the point that you have the worst of the most dysfunctional startup and the most lumbering and backward of old tech giants. There is a culture of blame. Some managers seem to only care about dates. There is some evidence that some managers even present dates to external customers that are far more aggressive than the engineers on a project provided in their schedule estimations. I have witnessed multiple occasions where engineers and leads are blamed when a project is off schedule or might be off schedule. I've seen leads expression of project schedules being in jeopardy and request for allocated engineers who have not had time to do their story work be ignored for weeks. Then the team and/or the lead get blamed and even chased off the project. A major backend team has to fill out a stand up form every single day and list out what they did the day before and what they will do that day. It is as if the entire team is on a performance plan. Some engineers protested when this was instituted but they were put down. It is a very demeaning and demoralizing environment. There is no effort to provide career growth. Myself and others have never even been asked what their career goals are. I know of one engineer who expressed a goal of working on a high performing team whose work is presented at conferences and in trade journals to a Senior Director of Engineering who told this engineer that this was not a reality and to pursue these dreams as a hobby. Clearly there is a disconnect between a world-class engineering company like Microsoft and the PIQ organization in that regard. This is true and it is astonishing. Some backend teams have a manager who denigrates them publicly and permits other team mates to denigrate each other at stand-ups and retros. I've witnessed people within the team say publicly things like: "This test is BS" "Do you agree that this work should not be submitted half baked?" "Maybe engineers don't test their code. Is that our culture?" The manager is present and says nothing. It is perfectly permissible to say things like this to colleagues in public without seeking the context or full picture. There are many good engineers in the team who test their code and test it very well. The build/deploy infrastructure is terrible and so it is easy to make mistakes. Also, the unit test framework has odd bugs and behavior in the type system at runtime. Rather than address these issues, some prefer to denigrate team mates. The most powerful leads do not facilitate autonomous technical decision making. It often seems like rivalry and upstaging is the goal rather than scaling out the team and encouraging localized decision making where the full context of decision making is fully understood. Many leads cooperate, but others are cut-throat and have the support of immediate management while upper management is impervious to the local team's culture. Those same team mates who like to denigrate do not have a good engineering methodology. Problem solving and eliminating engineering friction and issues caused by bad infrastructure and tooling is approached by management and the most influential leads by proposing even more manual processes and procedures. Some engineers propose solving the issues with software, automation and better tools. They tend to get ignored, but stuck with an ever growing set of manual procedures to perform. One example of this is when an engineer wanted to enforce not dropping even a fraction of a percent on code coverage even when coverage requirements are still met. The most powerful lead/manager proposed taking a screen shot of the code coverage before any commits and a screen shot when the PR is opened and pasting the screenshots into the pull request description. This is not a joke. Even better, the engineer wanting to impose this "0% drop in existing code coverage" standard said, "How do we make everyone do this?" The ultimate solution was to force engineers to do a dummy commit and open a PR before starting a story. I was shocked that this was instituted and enforced and that in an already overworked team nobody was given time or a greenlight to build an Azure plugin for Java to do this or contribute a feature to Jacoco or switch to sonarcube as a solution. I am hopeful that the culture at PIQ engineering is not representative of that at Microsoft. I suspect it is not. I recommend that engineering candidates steer clear of PromoteIQ engineering and apply only to jobs at Microsoft proper. In summary, there is a culture of blame, lack of support of high ambitions and accomplishment, a toxic environment with a few powerfully placed bad apples, and good engineers addled with bad infrastructure and a toxic working environment.