I joined a company I fell in love with. The team was amazing, the direction was amazing, etc.
Then we were acquired. All the visions and plans that we had made for where our company was going to go fell apart. The new company was in charge.
It still hurts, at times. I no longer work for the previous company.
You will soon work for Microsoft. I would recommend beginning to act like it: see if Microsoft is the kind of company that you want to work for and find teams within Microsoft that you would like to work with, if you want to work for Microsoft. If not, well, there are other companies.
Pay - expect to be mapped to their levels, and your pay related to that level. Not much flexibility unless you are promoted to the next level after performance review. So make sure mapping is done fairly. They would usually use your CTO and other tech leaders to help them map.
Layoffs - law probability, but with each perf review 5% is expected to get less than Meets All - and those are candidates for departure.
Politics - it’s terrible. Try not to let anyone from MSFT join your team for as long as you can - or interview them ferociously and gather references from several teams that they worked with before, to make sure you are not getting a surprise. Some of the transfers from MSFT to our team had previously known HR issues that we were not aware of but later on got hurt by.
Do remember that Microsoft is a very large company and each team operates differently. It's not especially useful to declare the whole company a political nightmare.
Disclosure: former Microsoft employee. I have no trouble speaking my mind about how I feel about the company but I prefer more honest nuance.
Comments
I joined a company I fell in love with. The team was amazing, the direction was amazing, etc.
Then we were acquired. All the visions and plans that we had made for where our company was going to go fell apart. The new company was in charge.
It still hurts, at times. I no longer work for the previous company.
You will soon work for Microsoft. I would recommend beginning to act like it: see if Microsoft is the kind of company that you want to work for and find teams within Microsoft that you would like to work with, if you want to work for Microsoft. If not, well, there are other companies.
Take care of yourself, first.
Been acquired by MSFT previously.
Pay - expect to be mapped to their levels, and your pay related to that level. Not much flexibility unless you are promoted to the next level after performance review. So make sure mapping is done fairly. They would usually use your CTO and other tech leaders to help them map.
Layoffs - law probability, but with each perf review 5% is expected to get less than Meets All - and those are candidates for departure.
Politics - it’s terrible. Try not to let anyone from MSFT join your team for as long as you can - or interview them ferociously and gather references from several teams that they worked with before, to make sure you are not getting a surprise. Some of the transfers from MSFT to our team had previously known HR issues that we were not aware of but later on got hurt by.
Thank you this is amazing advice and just the kind I needed
Do remember that Microsoft is a very large company and each team operates differently. It's not especially useful to declare the whole company a political nightmare.
Disclosure: former Microsoft employee. I have no trouble speaking my mind about how I feel about the company but I prefer more honest nuance.