Microsoft Principal Software Engineer/Manager reviews

Very limited ability to actually make an impact. Satya has been doing great work to improve the culture but so much of the upper management is made up of ancient Microsoft people that the culture is incredibly slow to change and the company is slow to respond to technology changes, particularly as compared to open source. There are some bright spots where change is taking hold.

Many things pop-up when you've been somewhere for decades, but one thing that I like to mention here is this HR policy, where even if you have years of industry experience, or even if you are technically qualified, yet you are treated as a college hire no matter if a hiring team might find you as fully qualified or not. Basically, hiring teams don't really get to see you in order to evaluate your qualification unless they have a req for a college hire. This means that you as a candidate have less opportunities since you are pushed into a smaller set of job-opening (and auto-rejected from industry-hire category), and you as a hiring team are being excluded from considering candidates that are technically qualified. This seems insane, policy trumps qualification! It was like this when I joined back the end of the last century! Crazy that such an irrational policy is still the HR mantra. I can whine about stack ranking and such, but many people have in the past, so I'll let it go.