Working at Microsoft
For the past few years I always thought that my
dream job would be to work at Microsoft.
They’re located in a cool area, nearby Seattle, they have tons of money to spend
on developing cool new products, and you get to work with a bunch of intelligent,
diverse people. However, over the past few months, the stuff that I’ve been
reading has lead me to change my mind. This post
by Dare Obasanjo explains why he doesn’t think he’ll be at Microsoft in five years.
This other post
by Dare describes the meager raises that MS employees get. Now, I can understand
that not every employee can get a 10% raise when you have that many employees, but
we’re talking in the 2% range for a rating of 3.5 out of 4 on your review.
I think that working at Microsoft sounds so great from the marketing of their products,
because their marketing is pretty good. It gives the impression that everyone
works in some sort of utopia in Redmond, free from any executive bureaucracy and
red tape, when really, they must have the same problems that all big companies have.
dream job would be to work at Microsoft.
They’re located in a cool area, nearby Seattle, they have tons of money to spend
on developing cool new products, and you get to work with a bunch of intelligent,
diverse people. However, over the past few months, the stuff that I’ve been
reading has lead me to change my mind. This post
by Dare Obasanjo explains why he doesn’t think he’ll be at Microsoft in five years.
This other post
by Dare describes the meager raises that MS employees get. Now, I can understand
that not every employee can get a 10% raise when you have that many employees, but
we’re talking in the 2% range for a rating of 3.5 out of 4 on your review.
I think that working at Microsoft sounds so great from the marketing of their products,
because their marketing is pretty good. It gives the impression that everyone
works in some sort of utopia in Redmond, free from any executive bureaucracy and
red tape, when really, they must have the same problems that all big companies have.
If this internal criticism keeps up, recruiting is going to get more difficult.
Scoble always says that Microsoft is looking for great developers all the time,
but has problems getting enough of them, and if the next generation of developers
loses touch with corporate Microsoft and flocks to Google (which, ironically, has
the same properties that used to attract people to Microsoft) Microsoft could potentially
be in a bit of trouble, and no amount of AOL stock or reorgs is going to help.
DawlinLi said,
Wrote on September 22, 2005 @ 3:53 pm
what exactly is so attractive about working at Google?
breichelt said,
Wrote on September 22, 2005 @ 4:03 pm
I think people want to work at Google because they have a reputation for innovation and a cool, hip culture, reputations that arguably, Microsoft had, but doesn’t anymore. I cannot recall an instance of hearing about someone who was pissed about the bureaucracy at Google. I have no idea how much they pay people, or what the raises are like, so thats anyones guess.
DawlinLi said,
Wrote on September 22, 2005 @ 4:14 pm
And also, I think MS has plans to move a lot of jobs to Asia like what IBM has done which might explain their effort (or lack therof) in keeping existing developers.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on September 22, 2005 @ 5:01 pm
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html