Friday, August 23, 2013

Steve Ballmer is Going to Frickin' Retire From Microsoft!

OH
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
MY
Moving forward
GOODNESS
Microsoft's next CEO Who's on the short list ZDNet
+1.

Liked.

Favorited.

Ka-ching!

A well prepared blogger, even a crusty spider-web covered 99.9%-retired one like me, would have at least had a post ready to go for this glorious circumstance, like how most news organizations have obituaries written up and ready to publish. I had no such optimism that this would be happening before 2017.

To me, this throws the whole in-process re-org upside down. Why re-org under the design of the exiting leader? Even if the Senior Leadership Team goes forward saying that they support the re-org, it's undermined by everyone who is a part of it now questioning whether the new leader will undo and recraft the decisions being made now. I'd much rather Microsoft be organized under the vision of the new leader and their vision.

As for that new leader? Let the guessing game begin. How about first crafting the list of skills. Microsoft is huge and complex and Ballmer does has to be respected for running something as crazy as Microsoft to the point where it always seemed like no one could possibly replace him.

The first skill I'm putting down on my CEO job requisition is: "Has architected and implemented software features at the Principal level." Yeah, I want someone who has written complex software to run a big huge software (and devices) company. Crazy.

What are your thoughts?

This is going to be in interesting 2013 Company Meeting. As for Ballmer's habit of coming out to an inspirational song, may I suggest Dancing in the Street. Because that's what my heart is playing right now. And of course, we need an exit song, too. Something, that perhaps begins with:

"Na-na-na-na, Na-na-na-na, Hey-Hey-Hey. -"


613 comments:

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Anonymous said...

"The only hope is Windows Phone. Nokia has great devices. Yet, they are focusing on the camera aspect, and that may give us a hint: the OS is not really bringing any customers"

Most of the reviews for the Nokia phone go something like this: "Amazing device, what a shame that it's saddled with the Windows Phone OS."

The entire Metro/Windows 8 vision is flat-out wrong. Most of us knew it was wrong long before it shipped, but key people were so hot for everything in the world to be Metro (like Julie Larson-Green, a person who if there is any justice at all in this universe will find herself one day working as a line-PM again where she belongs) that thousands of employees saying "What the hell?" made no difference.

Windows 8 should be viewed as an interesting exploration that didn't pan-out, and the team should look hard at itself in the mirror, work to understand the lessons learned, and deliver something good for Windows 9.

And the new CEO should use Julie Larson-Green as a model for everything that's wrong with Microsoft. How on EARTH did someone so junior, with such limited skills, with no vision and with such a lackluster public presence, ever find herself running one of the largest businesses in the world? It's directly at the heart of Microsoft's disease.

Anonymous said...

Even Al Capone ran soup kitchens xD

http://chicagocrimescenes.blogspot.com/2008/12/capone.html

Anonymous said...

ValueAct news:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/30/us-microsoft-valueact-idUKBRE97T0X520130830

Previous ValueAct action:

http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2005/06/07/valueacts-quottough-lovequot-letter.aspx

Anonymous said...

The entire Metro/Windows 8 vision is flat-out wrong. Most of us knew it was wrong long before it shipped, but key people were so hot for everything in the world to be Metro.

Amen to that! The dynamic duo, Sinofsky and Larson-Green, latched on to the Metro everywhere idea, and people who disagreed had a tendency to disappear from the GAL.

At one point, SteveSi sent out a creepier-than-hell email about "one Windows, one vision." He wanted an anthill, not an engineering organization.

"Unfurl the banners, look at the screen;
Never before has such glory been seen.
Oceania, Oceania, Oceania, 'tis for thee.
Every deed, every thought 'tis for thee.
Every deed, every thought 'tis for thee."


He seemed to think he could bully customers and external developers into accepting his vision, the same way he bullied Microsoft employees. It just didn't work.

Anonymous said...

Holy Cow: Its only been a week and so many names are just thrown in the air without consideration of what it really needs to be done. I think Las Vegas line is on an insider. How about you guys?? An insider will keep the peace with the troops. An outsider would have shuffle the whole managing team starting with LisaB an Julie LG, so it would be a nerve wrecking idea that does not go along with a conservative board.
So lets keep it simple: Insider or Outsider?

Anonymous said...

I frequently hear some variation of - "microsoft has failed in consumer software but can rely on enterprise sales". As a former softie and current enterprise consultant, I'd say those folks are in for a huge surprise.

Case in point - I recently heard a Fortune 500 CIO describe his newly completed deployment of 15,000 iPads. The deployment capped an exhaustive 18 month planning process and he's quite pleased with the results.

How many other MSFT enterprise customers are near the end of their process for migrating to iOS, Android, and AWS?

Anonymous said...

An insider would only keep the peace with the troops if there were no civil war. Otherwise, they'd have to abandon their old loyalties to have any hope of uniting the army.

An good outsider may be able to unite the army, or they may just add fuel to the fire by bringing in a third faction... or even more incompetently, get the old factions to unite against the new guy - destroy him, then start fighting amongst themselves again xD

Anonymous said...

"The entire Metro/Windows 8 vision is flat-out wrong. Most of us knew it was wrong long before it shipped, but key people were so hot for everything in the world to be Metro."

I used to think that test was the worst discipline at Microsoft, until I started to really interact with the user experience discipline. It is awful. The test discipline is weak because most of them are young, using the position is a stopgap, during which they try as hard as possible to make a good contribution. Compare this to the UX discipline at Microsoft: a lot of people that think painting your hair with an odd color, talking through the nose and including the word user in every other sentence gives them some divine power and good taste. Just because the word user is in their title they think that they are the user, as if an Executive Assistant was an executive (I know several do think that!).

At Microsoft most Visual Designers and UX Architects think that carrying a Mac, dressing in leather and knowing how to draw storyboards is all it takes to succeed. I’m tired of their anecdotes being used as if those are scientifically obtained data points. Worse: I’m tired of suggesting alternatives to their absurd design only to be rebuffed at first due to some detail in colors or shapes. Later, after some high-level presentation or prototype feedback goes terribly wrong they come back with their new design: exactly what I or some other developer suggested several months earlier + some different colors! No wonder the company logo is what it is (I can’t dare to really write my opinion, unless the blog goes R-rated!)

At least we have where to start the layoffs: HR+UX+Marketing already provides several thousand.

Anonymous said...

Carve Microsoft into pieces and sell them separately to unlock shareholder value.

Anonymous said...

Given a toxic enough culture, the whole becomes lesser than the sum of its parts.

Anonymous said...

Have any of you not signed your review? My manager has included significant factual errors justifying the crappy score. After many years here I have just a wee bit of integrity left. Not much mind you, but enough that I'm not happy signing something where he's included data that is not true. Why he didn't use subjective measures like 'visibility' to screw me over tells you his maturity.
So, have any of you not signed your review and if so, what occured?

Anonymous said...

Oh, Zini-Microsoft, we hardly knew ye!

Anonymous said...

"Have any of you not signed your review? My manager has included significant factual errors justifying the crappy score. After many years here I have just a wee bit of integrity left. Not much mind you, but enough that I'm not happy signing something where he's included data that is not true. Why he didn't use subjective measures like 'visibility' to screw me over tells you his maturity.
So, have any of you not signed your review and if so, what occured?"


I refused to sign an especially ridiculous review once and absolutely nothing happened. There is no legal requirement for you to sign your review -- it's just Microsoft internal checkboxes. It doesn't matter to anyone but you.

Weigh your decision against your future career at Microsoft. Refusing to sign your review generally will alienate you to your management chain and make it that much harder for you to go elsewhere in the company. If you truly don't care, then don't sign it. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it will ever result in anything other than the personal good feeling you get from giving the middle finger to the machine.

Anonymous said...

"And the new CEO should use Julie Larson-Green as a model for everything that's wrong with Microsoft. How on EARTH did someone so junior, with such limited skills, with no vision and with such a lackluster public presence, ever find herself running one of the largest businesses in the world? It's directly at the heart of Microsoft's disease."

I'll be you a thousand dollars she was banging Sinofsky. No other explanation makes any sense.

Anonymous said...

Ah Microsoft, zero sum gaming at its finest.

Anonymous said...

Job #1: The Metro Rubicon.

How do we retreat back across it and return to a Windows 7ish desktop experience?

Obviously, the steps in 8.1, while helpful, will not appease our core business and power user constituency.

Corporate installs cannot be done with 3rd party hacks and 5 dollar programs to return the start menu.

The amount of mind share we are losing is off the charts.

I am not asking how we roll this back from a technical perspective, but organizationally. Technically, the solution is simple: we give the user a choice to use the start menu.

Organizationly, how many people have to be fired in order for this to happen?

And in what time frame is this possible?

SteveB is going to be around for another year. This cannot be done with him and his cronies in charge. It is going to be years for this to happen. And if a crony ends up in the big chair, who knows, then we are looking at bleeding market share over the course of 3 to 5 years before a real palace coup can occur.

Is the die really cast?

Anonymous said...

KT and Brummel has to go!!!

Anonymous said...

Good PMs are important even though we SDEs like to tease them but asking SDEs to step up to "their level" is silly.

Are the PMs going to step to my level? Please feel free to take a stab at my job sometime. If anything goes wrong anywhere in a distributed system its me on the phone telling OPS what to do. I highly value the organizational skills of a good PM but I can't manage the technical end of things and be a people person that can handle partners during an outage. No human being can time slice that way.

Anonymous said...

Job #1: The Metro Rubicon.

How do we retreat back across it and return to a Windows 7ish desktop experience?


Windows 8.1 was Microsoft's one chance to step back from the edge of the Metro abyss, and they squandered it. The customer base isn't going to sit around forever and wait for Microsoft to get things right.

There was no shortage of public feedback about the Metro desktop after Windows 8 was released. People hated it. Not to mention the low adoption rate of the OS among current Windows users. It wasn't a secret that the experiment failed.

Instead of doing something about the problem, SteveB and his cronies came up with a bunch of tortured explanations for why nobody was buying the OS.

Even worse, the pathetic excuse for a Start button in 8.1 seems to be Microsoft telling its customers to go f*ck themselves. "You want a Start button? Here, we'll give a Start button."

It isn't just the enterprise and "power users" who hate Metro on the desktop. Casual computer users, who may have spent years learning their way around Windows, have been told they need to abandon everything they know and learn a completely new skill set. (It's the same thing Larson-Green did to Office when she stuck that bloody ribbon on everything.) For many of these users, the path of least resistance is to buy a Mac.

The religion of Metro seems to be some kind of collective psychosis that's taken over Microsoft management. The company logo, all the Microsoft websites, even the building signs and the campus shuttles. Everything has to be a brightly-colored square and Segoe UI.

The die has already been cast.

Anonymous said...

Oh, Zini-Microsoft, we hardly knew ye!

Based on the timing between Zini's arrival and its disappearance, there was probably a cease-and-desist order from Microsoft's lawyers. Too much transparency about salaries and ratings in a public place.

Anonymous said...

The older generation always prefers the way things were. Eventually the newer generation, that was brought up with the ways things are, will just see it as normal, and revolt when things change again.

Yes, I agree that keeping UI easy to use is good, and that includes not completely redesigning it such that everyone has to relearn everything from scratch. Evolution in UI still has to come from somewhere though. You can't expect the UI to stay the same forever.

There's a more unfortunate reason for vast UI redesigns though. It's a lot harder to sell a new OS to noob consumers when all you can boast about is incredible performance, rock solid security, and awesome driver support. If they don't actually see anything different, they just keep on walking. For geeks and enterprise, it's different of course, but if you want buzz on the street, you gotta make a showy splash.

Of course, this isn't to say that the splash won't just end up pissing off your customers after drenching their work clothes.

Anonymous said...

what about the bribery accusations from Italy, Russia, China, Romania, Pakistan: are the people involved in deals getting a promotion after the reviews ?
if yes, great, keep up the great work.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

Anonymous said...

Total outsider, long-time reader here. I remember DEC's failure, and the DEC98 pdf doesn't explain the most important factor, the one which is really relevant in Microsoft's situation.

The denial of three concepts is enough to explain DEC's demise: microcomputers, Unix, and TCP/IP. For customers, minicomputers running VMS connected through DECnet didn't cut the mustard anymore, but Olsen (and almost everybody I met at DEC around 1992) refused to acknowledge this fact, when the company was already going south. Now compare this to Ballmer's attitude towards iPhones, and Microsoft's lack of general phone strategy, and the half-baked tablet attempts...

What MS needs right now is someone who will say "Windows is a legacy system. One that will stay for quite a while, but the present and the known future of user-centered computing is hand-held." And s/he would enforce this through the whole company, no matter what anyone else says.

No matter what BillG says.

I don't think it is even remotely possible, but you can only hope this kind of person becomes CEO - otherwise you'll have to tell your kids that Microsoft used to be a major corporation.

Anonymous said...

What we need is a strong, decisive leader willing to make the tough choices. One with a clear vision for the future, with the tenacity to see it through without letting anyone sway him from his path. Anyone that disagrees with his leadership should either keep quiet or find employment elsewhere. If there's anything in the company more important than his ego, I want it caught and shot right now.

Anonymous said...

My manager has included significant factual errors justifying the crappy score.

Same thing happened to me. In my case the a**hole lead was covering up her own mistake. She had assigned some important work to a junior team member and he never finished it. So she blamed me for the work not being finished!!! During the review discussion I argued with her that it wasn't even assigned to me. Her only response was to shrug. I reported this to my skip level and mentioned that there is proof via multiple emails. But he just ignored it.

Ask yourself if you really want to work at a place like this. For me the answer was obvious and I left.

Anonymous said...

The ValueAct president got offered a seat on the board. I think it’s pretty clear what happened. ValueAct only had 1% of the outstanding share but they made no secret of their dislike of Ballmer and their attempts to rally other big shareholders to their position. It would most likely have been an eventful shareholders meeting come November. Steve knew he was done, one way or another. By quitting now he gets to save face. Now the grown-ups will be in charge. The flip side of that coin is that what should have been done years ago, namely getting Microsoft back into fighting shape, is going to get done within the next year. Mini is finally going to get his wish.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

When I left Microsoft to go work for Amazon, I was struck by BrianV's lack of vision. After years in Windows he seemed only able to think in terms of operating systems. He kept talking about “building an e-commerce operating system”.

Interesting... I definitely agree with some of this!

I've worked for the man for 13 years (at the lower SDE tiers, not, like, directly FOR him). While I definitely agree that he came over with an idea to do the monolithic thing again - build an e-commerce platform - I feel as though he's backed well off that.

Additionally, I credit him almost entirely with the shift in his org away from massive sev-2 queues and dev burnout, towards a much more sustainable software development lifecycle. When Amazon first started, everything was feature feature feature ship ship ship just get shit out there and we'll worry about technical debt later. It was, at most, a two-year company; burnouts happened every day and people simply couldn't keep up the frantic pace of development coupled with the insane amount of pages at midnight from years of technical debt.

BrianV came over with this Microsoft idea of saying that technical debt was a Real Thing and something to be avoided. Hey, maybe we should consider the long-term effects of the decision. Just because we CAN patch this thing easily, later on, doesn't mean we SHOULD. Because while it's not patched, it's throwing sev-2s and waking up my team every damn night.

I still remember the switch, in promo doc reviews, from long lists of shipped features to everyone asking "And THEN what happened?". Sure, your guy wrote ten thousand features for productX. But then what happened? Did they cause sev2s? Did you have to rewrite massive parts of the codebase to accommodate further changes? Were these features things that customers liked?

I watched the AWS org learn the same thing - their ticket queue exploded, operational burdens massive and all before they started paying down the debt. I'm watching Digital now do the same thing again. Ship! Ship! Ship! Features are key! Don't worry about the long-term effects, we can fix 'em later! Just go go go go!

Both Amazon and Microsoft do a lot of things right, in a lot of regards. It pains me to see so much negativity here. No company is perfect, ever. You just got to find a place where the terrible problems are things that don't bother you as much :)

Yuhong Bao said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Yuhong Bao said...

Even worse, the pathetic excuse for a Start button in 8.1 seems to be Microsoft telling its customers to go f*ck themselves. "You want a Start button? Here, we'll give a Start button."
Well, Win8.1 is released only a year after Win8.0, and:
http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1081755-do-you-like-or-hate-windows-8/?view=findpost&p=595048551

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

"I'll be you a thousand dollars she was banging Sinofsky. No other explanation makes any sense."

sweet misogyny bro!

it's a woman, so you can bet your bottom dollar that there is LITERALLY NO OTHER EXPLANATION FOR HER SUCCESS than her whorin' her way to the top! yeah!



Plenty of bad execs are out there. Oddly, I don't hear you accusing Ballmer of having a good pair of kneepads. Your comment is terrible.

Anonymous said...

Not sure that just because ValueAct is stepping in that our messiah has arrived. I'll have to be agnostic until whatever new guy proves he's not just throwing rocks in a glass house.

Anonymous said...

sweet misogyny bro!

Right, because when somebody with absolutely no skills gets put into a position of extreme power for which they aren't even vaguely qualified, it's wrong to suggest they got there by banging someone.

Because there are so many other good explanations for it.

By the way, maybe Ballmer was never accused of having a good pair of kneepads because everybody already knew he was appointed to CEO because was Gates' good friend and college roommate?

Anonymous said...

By the way, maybe Ballmer was never accused of having a good pair of kneepads because everybody already knew he was appointed to CEO because was Gates' good friend and college roommate?
Well, THANK YOU, for putting those images in my head.

Anonymous said...

WRT to Julie Larson Green....what the hell is up with her plastic surgery/botox? She's out here looking like Cher. I can't even look her in the eyes when talking to her. I don't see any male VP's doing that. Although there have been one or two toupees.

Anonymous said...

Hey, what happens review-wise if you leave before June 30est? Are you out of the review model for sure, or can your old team use you as padding for their 4-5s? Does HR block any team from using departed employees in their calibrations?

Anonymous said...

"I agree that PMs are the heart of this org. I'm a PM and if it wasn't for us this company would be in a big mess now. Devs and SDETs need to step up to our level, and fast. Please."

Step up to your level ? as in your level of talking c0ck ? I wish there was a code generator which would translate all the nice talk that you PM's present to upper management into workable code.

Anonymous said...

Julie Green is the natural culmination of the sexism prevalent in promotions and reviews. I have a just okay female employee who was promoted early August out of blue in the review model without me or my manager proposing it.

johnpagenola said...

Can someone tell me why networking seems to be broken when Microsoft releases an OS, but later the stuff works? Obviously somebody knows what they are doing (like after W2000 SP2 or with W7 now as opposed to 2010).

Anonymous said...

Do men ever get ahead in Microsoft because they use their sexual wiles? Do any women get ahead in Microsoft by gaming the visibility and perception-vs-performance system?

Or are those skills better developed in a different company?

Anonymous said...

My thoughts:
Satya as new CEO? No way, he could not even handle some simple reorgs inside STB without having most of the smart people leaving for amzn or other teams. He has not done much except shuffling things, Azure is still a poorly utilized disaster with all the smart guys leaving and duds moving in. don’t go there.
Review system: think of is this way – if I needed to build a team of 10 ‘1’s to go out and win it is impossible. What I’m forced to build is a team of 60 – the 10 ‘1’s I need, 40 2/3/4/5 to fill out the stack, and 10 more in overhead to manage them. And now it will take much longer (I have to build the team and some of the dimwits I am FORCED to hire will slow things down) and cost much more (~500% more just in people and infrastructure). The reason msft has been infiltrated by duds is that it cannot be any other way with this sad review system. As a manager my hands are tied – sure, we can compete in the market, but we have to swim with anchors on our legs, it is sad. The review system needs to go!
SQL and Azure – clue phone – anyone trying to do anything with Azure is screwed, what few PMs they have cannot serve the customers who are trying to use them. They can’t even keep things like cert expiration under control. The smart people have left. The SQL team would be better off writing a service-agnostic cloud DB that would run great on AWS, then at least they would get some customers.
Big Data – shambles. They will never recover from the Dryad/Linq political disaster. Hadoop is crap everywhere, it won’t be better on Azure. Azure will soon be internal use only. Let AMZN have the 5% profit margins. Let’s write a cloud OS better than theirs that they would want to buy from us, that should be the real goal. It would tickle me pink to see our stuff running with our system software in a AWS datacenter and AMZN paying us for the software. We could make a decent profit there.
I have been to some principal meetings with some of the other contenders for the top spot, just say no, I was not impressed. While I think Win8 was a dog, I still think Sinofsky has what it takes, he certainly is clueful about strategy, getting test/dev/pm working together, etc. And he has excellent communication skills.
Trimming management – get rid of the failed PUMs who have taken over the test management positions, get real test managers who have actually earned these positions in there instead of clueless ex-PMs, they don’t know what they are doing and quality is taking a hit across the company. These people will all fit in fine at google.
PMs – no doubt, they are note-takers for dev these days, at least in my org. It is funny to see useless people who I kicked out of my team under a different discipline reincarnated as PMs. They can’t write a spec or design something new, but they are good at socializing. They have futures as rentboys!
And a last note on process. ‘Agile’ is killing us. These sub-par PMs use it as an excuse to write no real specs, they just spew endless TFS items and call it work. You can move very fast and still get requirements, write a decent spec, get it reviewed by dev/test/pm, write a little dev plan, get it reviewed by dev/test/pm, write a decent test plan, get it reviewed by dev/test/pm, and ship features monthly. Process IS important, and one of MSFTs former strengths was its ability to follow a rational process (some teams were better at this than others, of course…) but now we design features at a stand-up, go write some code for reasons that are irrelevant and not understood a month later because there is no real plan and there is no real documentation, but calories were burned so ‘work’ happened. Many teams now operate like this, if it does not get under control MSFT will start producing crapware like the competition and we’ll no longer differentiate on quality, reliability, and functionality. Hire/promote real leaders, make real plans and strategies, then execute in sustainable ways, and win.

Anonymous said...

What do other (successful) companies do if they don't have a stack system? Is it something they love or merely tolerate?

I've seen a lot of suggestions for a replacement CEO, but not many suggestions for how to replace the MS review system, despite the apparent hatred of it.

Anonymous said...

re : What do other (successful) companies do if they don't have a stack system? Is it something they love or merely tolerate?

differentiation is important, there are dozens of business books laying out alternative reward systems that differentiate in more constructive ways.

Anonymous said...

Julie Green is the natural culmination of the sexism prevalent in promotions and reviews.
This is definitely true for lead promotions in the test org. If you're a woman you're virtually guaranteed a lead position at L62-63. 70% of test leads in our org are women, mostly Indian.

Anonymous said...

For each review theory, what are examples of companies that have put them into practice? How well did it work out for them - in terms of both results and morale?

Anonymous said...

Julie Green is the natural culmination of the sexism prevalent in promotions and reviews. I have a just okay female employee who was promoted early August out of blue in the review model without me or my manager proposing it.

That's the diversity initiative in action.

Anonymous said...

Very interesting article on the MS review process on Slate:

Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/08/microsoft_ceo_steve_ballmer_retires_a_firsthand_account_of_the_company_s.html

Anonymous said...

Another thing all of you engineers need to do is get a business education. I will tell you a few things. First, far too many MBAs with a limited tech background are key decision makers. Second, too many PMs who make it to the exec ranks think they know a enough about business. Finally, and engineer getting a MBA is more easily done than a MBA getting an engineering degree. All you ambitious engineers need to go get your MBA (even online at night) and it will help all of us in the fight against the business guys who make bad choices driving technology, and the engineers who make foolish business choices. You don’t like Ballmer? You don’t like the choices to replace him? Then you should have been preparing yourself better! This is the clearest way to start improving our management talent!

Anonymous said...

> > > For each review theory, what are examples of companies that have put them into practice? How well did it work out for them - in terms of both results and morale?


This question assumes that a review system is needed. It’s not. The review system at Microsoft mostly exists to justify the existence of an oversized HR department.


Two very simple things can replace the current over-engineered review systems:

1 – People should get feedback about their work. Not just from their manager, but also from anybody they interact with within the company.

2 – Managers must have full authority to make hiring and firing decisions. If somebody doesn’t make the cut, his or her manager should be able to swiftly terminate their employment. And if a manager believes everybody in the team is contributing the way they’re expected to, HR shouldn’t be able to come interfere with that by dictating arbitrary attrition quotas.

With those two things in place, morale will be up, less time will be wasted on performance reviews, and teams will be more balanced (not forced to fire people who contribute simply because they ended up on the wrong end of the curve, and not forced to keep underperformers for months or years because HR has to have all its boxes checked before they can actually kick the morons out).
And most importantly, most people currently warming up chairs in Microsoft’s HR department will be able to leave and go back to doing what they were meant to do: asking people if they want fries with that.

Anonymous said...

Another thing all of you engineers need to do is get a business education. I will tell you a few things. First, far too many MBAs with a limited tech background are key decision makers. Second, too many PMs who make it to the exec ranks think they know a enough about business. Finally, and engineer getting a MBA is more easily done than a MBA getting an engineering degree. All you ambitious engineers need to go get your MBA (even online at night) and it will help all of us in the fight against the business guys who make bad choices driving technology, and the engineers who make foolish business choices. You don’t like Ballmer? You don’t like the choices to replace him? Then you should have been preparing yourself better! This is the clearest way to start improving our management talent!

Anonymous said...

Another thing all of you engineers need to do is get a business education. I will tell you a few things. First, far too many MBAs with a limited tech background are key decision makers. Second, too many PMs who make it to the exec ranks think they know a enough about business. Finally, and engineer getting a MBA is more easily done than a MBA getting an engineering degree. All you ambitious engineers need to go get your MBA (even online at night) and it will help all of us in the fight against the business guys who make bad choices driving technology, and the engineers who make foolish business choices. You don’t like Ballmer? You don’t like the choices to replace him? Then you should have been preparing yourself better! This is the clearest way to start improving our management talent!

Anonymous said...

How does one reach management in a new system? Would it require the same kind of backstabbing that allegedly plagues stack ranking?

Anonymous said...

Funny that Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman are in the top 10 at http://nextmicrosoftceo.com

...or should it be funny?

Anonymous said...

Stallman's lack of personal hygene precludes any executive employment

Anonymous said...

> > > How does one reach management in a new system?


Why is this even a question? Think outside of the narrow confines of the current system. Promoting somebody to management should be a hiring decision like any other. If there is an actual need for a manager position then whoever is destined to end up as that person’s manager must hire him. It’s his responsibility to figure it out. He should be able to consider internal as well as external candidates. In any case, it should be up to the person who is responsible for that team to make the decision, not HR, and they shouldn’t rely on a complicated process.

The problem at Microsoft is that responsibility and accountability are diluted. The review process as it exists today takes decisions out of managers’ hands, because they do not control what will happen at stack ranking meetings above their own hierarchical level. They might think they’ve given somebody a 2 and find out that as reviews got aggregated the guy ended up with a 4. It wasn’t the manager’s decision but he or she still has to justify it in the feedback they have to write.
Ideally a manager should have the freedom to give the feedback they want / need to give and make any hiring / firing decision that they deem appropriate. If they screw it up they are in turn responsible to their own manager who also has the authority to fire them.

There is no need for a complicated review system that draws people’s attention away from the actual business of the company three months out of every year.
The review system has to go. Completely. Managers should be responsible for hiring and firing with absolutely zero HR interference.

Anonymous said...

You know your tech company has gone corporate when nerd-chique is no longer acceptable as a representative. Even Ballmer had his moments.

http://i.imgur.com/JDob4nk.gif

Torvalds and Stallman do somewhat lead organizations. Whether that kind of leadership would actually work when it comes to profits and consumer markets is a different story though, but I'd say it would certainly change our typical college recruits if one of them were CEO instead of an old industry guy.

Anonymous said...

If two or more people on your team have their eyes on the same management slot that is going to open up, what is to prevent the same kind of backstabbing that the new system is supposed to fix?

Typical end result of limited resources and unlimited desires?

Anonymous said...

> > > If two or more people on your team have their eyes on the same management slot that is going to open up, what is to prevent the same kind of backstabbing that the new system is supposed to fix?


If I manage a team and have full hiring / firing authority, backstabbers are fired. Plain and simple.


I didn't make up that "new system". It is actually practiced in some places, and they run laps around Microsoft.

Anonymous said...

And how would you recognize backstabbing when the current system can't? I don't suppose we're intentionally turning a blind-eye to backstabbing - or are we?

As someone else mentioned, they act courteous, but withhold just enough to ensure their competition fails. How would you detect the malice in their intentions? You know what evils lurk in the hearts of men?

Anonymous said...

Read what you just wrote one more time: “How would YOU recognize backstabbing when the current SYSTEM can’t?”

In one case you have a SYSTEM and in the other you have PEOPLE.


The PEOPLE at Microsoft recognize backstabbing when they see it. The SYSTEM just doesn’t let them deal with it. My solution is to remove the system and let people make decisions.


I have a feeling that no matter what I write you will keep questioning the pertinence of change. You’re a textbook example of what I’ve heard hiring managers refer to as the “Microsoft programming”. Once you buy into the Microsoft culture it becomes extremely difficult to reprogram yourself and become employable elsewhere. I have witnessed catastrophic hiring failures involving Microsoft veterans, both in Seattle and in the Valley, because those people were unable to shed their old MS habits. They were back at Microsoft within months.

Anonymous said...

2 – Managers must have full authority to make hiring and firing decisions



you're just inviting cronyism here. Google doesn't grant full authority to managers when it comes to hiring, instead, most companies that give such authority live to see their engineering team get diluted to the point that it's hard to find a competent team simply because it's human nature to hire those somewhat related to you someway.

Anonymous said...

> > > you're just inviting cronyism here.

Think recursively. Sure I can hire my retarded cousin but I am responsible for my team's performance to my manager, who also has full authority to fire me.

In a company that is data-driven and uses metrics like service uptime or adoption rates, as opposed to "visibility", nobody in their right mind will hire a substandard candidate and risk their own job.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't say I'd question all changes. I don't like the current system, but that doesn't mean I'd just accept any change that is proposed. First you have to prove it would actually work when the old one is replaced.

One of the things that is broken about the current system is that it pits employees against each other - making it very tempting to backstab if they actually want the rewards we dangle in front of them. If a new promotion process is put in place that still tempts employees to hurt each other, the underlying problem remains.

Here's some management theory that has actually been put to use in Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in... interactions (i.e., feedback) between the elements of a system can result in internal restrictions that force the system to behave as a single organism that automatically seeks a steady state. It is this steady state that determines the output of the system rather than the individual elements. Thus it is the structure of the organization rather than the employees, alone, which holds the key to improving the quality of output.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

"Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance" is listed among Deming's Seven Deadly Diseases. It may be said that rank-and-yank puts success or failure of the organization on the shoulders of the individual worker. Deming stresses the need to understand organizational performance as fundamentally a function of the corporate systems and processes created by management in which workers find themselves embedded. He sees so-called merit-based evaluation as misguided and destructive.

[This isn't to say I'm some die-hard Deming devotee, but this is an example of management theory that has been put to use, and there are real world effects we can look at.]

Anonymous said...

Microsoft is not salvageable. As the comments here proves yet again. Sell the company in pieces and fire most employees. See Motorola or RIMM.

Anonymous said...




Another thing all of you engineers need to do is get a business education...

All you ambitious engineers need to go get your MBA...



Truer words were never spoken.

I've never worked for Microsoft (although I turned down Microsoft offers twice in the 1990's, and I deeply regret not taking the first offer, not so much regret about turning down the second offer a few years later).

But I did go on to get an MBA in my spare time.

And, I can tell you, as a still-technical engineer (who only applies the MBA stuff as a hobby) the MBA made a big positive difference (positive, as in influencing product strategy, organizational effectiveness, and healthy development of the people on my teams).

Anonymous said...

"There is no need for a complicated review system that draws people’s attention away from the actual business of the company three months out of every year.
The review system has to go. Completely. Managers should be responsible for hiring and firing with absolutely zero HR interference."

+1

Anonymous said...

Julie Green is the natural culmination of the sexism prevalent in promotions and reviews.
This is definitely true for lead promotions in the test org. If you're a woman you're virtually guaranteed a lead position at L62-63. 70% of test leads in our org are women, mostly Indian.


Now that promotions started to show up in the GAL, one can definitely see this. I'm not disputing that some people deserve recognition. Yet, I believe that the meaning of "Partner" should be that such person is able to run a company of a reasonable size. Most of our "Partner Test Managers" cannot run an event. Yet, there goes a million dollars per year.

Time to really break up the company and have at least half of the partners and principals seeking a job elsewhere, if they can.

Anonymous said...

The current review system does not reward collaboration.

I have seen 50+ efforts in building monitoring and deployment for Azure, why not take a unified approach across MS? Because there is no incentive to collaborate, instead everyone want to justify having large team and develop their own solution. The Not Invented Here syndrome is very widespread.

And I have seen managers who like to exercise their role power and tell their teams what they should do without explaining why. Lot of them are "Director" types (red in insights) and do not care about what their team says. There is almost no listening, if there is no listening then how can you get feedback? If you cannot get feedback then how can you improve?

I have now worked in two divisions and I have observed this kind of arrogance. This need to change, unless people listen to each other and to their customers we will be producing wrong things.

But this is cultural change which is not easy. Someone said change happens with one death at a time. Unless we get rid of such managers there will be no change. It might be better to get rid of all the Managers whose employee poll and feedback are one std deviation below their manager. And add some more metrics, make collaboration first class behavior otherwise it is going to be big problem.

Anonymous said...

"But I did go on to get an MBA in my spare time.

And, I can tell you, as a still-technical engineer (who only applies the MBA stuff as a hobby) the MBA made a big positive difference (positive, as in influencing product strategy, organizational effectiveness, and healthy development of the people on my teams)."

How much (if anything) do you think all the "manager training" that we have these days come anywhere close to making up for the lack of an MBA?

Anonymous said...

> There is no legal requirement for you to sign your review -- it's just Microsoft internal checkboxes. It doesn't matter to anyone but you.

Well - read the fine print. Signing the review just means acknowledging that this is what your manager talked to you about. Doesn't mean that you agree with his/her assessment. Not signing just means you get visibility way up the chain in an extremely negative way if your reasoning is "that's not right" as opposed to "that's not what he told me face-to-face in the review meeting". I've never seen any happy ending out of taking that approach, possibly because the people taking that approach were also the most narrow-minded, literally-inclined, OCD-pestered humans I've come across.

Anonymous said...

To be honest, so many comments here reek of childishness and pettiness. Granted we're not just talking about things of little consequence, but honestly some of this attitude I'd expect from a fifth grade playground.

Anonymous said...

Lol, considering the internet is also the home of 4chan, it may actually be a fifth grade playground

Anonymous said...

We 're talking about a company whose soon-to-be-gone CEO is known for his temper tantrums, for jumping around like a primate until he has sweat stains the size of Australia under his armpits, and for throwing chairs when one of his employees announces that he's leaving to go work for a competitor.... But it's the comments on this blog that "reek of childishness and pettiness"

Dude, are you for real?

Anonymous said...

Like father like son.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_leader

Anonymous said...

Speaking from the outside, Paul Maritz seems like a pretty good candidate. What's missing from his resume? Nothing.

The board (OK, maybe that's Gates) should also at least talk to Eric Schmidt and Mark Hurd. If they hired Hurd they'd take a pounding on PR, particularly by women's groups, but the man is smart as a whip. He would never have made the $900 million Surface inventory mistake.

Anonymous said...

"""> There is no legal requirement for you to sign your review -- it's just Microsoft internal checkboxes. It doesn't matter to anyone but you.

Well - read the fine print. Signing the review just means acknowledging that this is what your manager talked to you about. Doesn't mean that you agree with his/her assessment. Not signing just means you get visibility way up the chain in an extremely negative way if your reasoning is "that's not right" as opposed to "that's not what he told me face-to-face in the review meeting". I've never seen any happy ending out of taking that approach, possibly because the people taking that approach were also the most narrow-minded, literally-inclined, OCD-pestered humans I've come across.""

Don't sign or checkbox anything if you don't agree with it. From personal experience with the legal process in a Microsoft review, if you sign it, then start a legal action, the employment attorney will ask why you signed it, and in deposition, Microsoft attorneys will ask why you signed it. The "checking the box just says you had the meeting" is CRAP. I agree, not signing it will get you and your chain of command noticed and then the questions will start. Also, you can attach a document to your review saying anything you want. Of course that can be read by anyone who has access to your former reviews. In personal experience, I refused to sign until some bullshit was removed. You would be surprised how bad a manager wants to make that checkbox deadline. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

Come on folks, the choice is clear: MARLENA WERDER for CEO. She laughs at managers who can't perform a physical task (Duke offsite 2008), and also likes to remove long time employees who are over 55 (she did it at IBM). A leader with vision.

Anonymous said...

Eric Schmidt is a famous anti-Microsoft guy, why people think he want to be Microsoft's CEO? Besides I don't see any reason he want to quit his current job.

Anonymous said...

……"I have seen 50+ efforts in building monitoring and deployment for Azure, why not take a unified approach across MS? Because there is no incentive to collaborate, instead everyone want to justify having large team and develop their own solution. The Not Invented Here syndrome is very widespread."

Cannot agree more. People in a small org cannot even collaborate with each other, how can we expect people collaborate across company wide, there are something seriously wrong with Microsoft, most team now only care about their own issues and deliveries, that will be enough to make them good in the review, and for top level leaders, either they don't have insight into these problems, or they don't anything with it.

Anonymous said...

Don't change horses in midstream.

- Famous last words ;)

Anonymous said...

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NextMicrosoftCEO&mode=realtime is getting entertaining. A few days ago, it seemed Jerome would be the only one tweeting.

Anonymous said...

Hey, what happens review-wise if you leave before June 30est? Are you out of the review model for sure, or can your old team use you as padding for their 4-5s? Does HR block any team from using departed employees in their calibrations?

I was told that the cut off date is sometime in May (sorry don't know the exact date). If you leave after the cutoff date the old team does your review. If you leave before the cutoff date the new team does the review. In the latter case the new team has to take the mid-year review results and the transition review (if any) into consideration.

Anonymous said...

collaboration my b***. geniuses don't collaborate with each other into successes, more often than not, it's the losers who delude themselves into believing what ails them is not their own tastelessness and stupidity rather than some intangible easily fixed by removing their own scapegoat, in this case: ballmer.

Success collaborating with success may or may not be lead to bigger success. Failure collaborating with failures however will surely lead to bigger failures. The problem is not there are 50+ effort aimed at solving the problems, the problem is none of them does a half-decent job, the few that actually does got killed because they dare to not put some old fart called windows front and center.

Metro failed not because windows bu didn't collaborate with xbox or whatever, it failed because it sucks. End of story.

Before clamoring for collaboration, MS people should spend their time coming up with half usable products, otherwise, nothing else matters. Hoping office will carry the idiotic Metro to success is simply delusional.

Anonymous said...

You don't get great products if every "genius" is out there promoting their own pet projects and trying to push down the other ones, because they "obviously" don't deserve as much attention as me.

Anonymous said...

Last year, manager and I set expectations that we'll be eyeing for a Senior. April this year, he said it's likely not happen as I haven't done my time in level.


Any lead that tells you in advance (specially a year in advance) that you are getting a promotion or a good review score is full of shit. Simply put, it is not up to the lead. The final review score and promotion decision is made by upper management and the lead has no involvement.

Anonymous said...

They killed Zini! Bastards!

Anonymous said...

I was told that the cut off date is sometime in May (sorry don't know the exact date). If you leave after the cutoff date the old team does your review. If you leave before the cutoff date the new team does the review. In the latter case the new team has to take the mid-year review results and the transition review (if any) into consideration.

Yeah, that is well documented on hrweb.
What if you say sayonara to the company? What happens review-wise?

Anonymous said...

Elop is coming back and 32k new people

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/02/microsoft-will-acquire-nokias-devices-and-services-business/

Anonymous said...

Hope MS snatches up Kodak and Dell. Let's get all the losers together in one house.

Anonymous said...

"Elop is coming back and 32k new people"

Great. This will bring Microsoft pretty close to the size DEC was when it started crumbling under its own weight 20 years go.

If I hadn't already hopped on a raft I'd sure as hell get off that sinking ship right now.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile it looks more and more like XBox One will be halk-baked.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/02/xbox-one-wont-support-external-storage-at-launch/

Anonymous said...

nice, we got a great potential CEO who has lived through a turnaround, superior hardware design, manufacturing, marketing and supply chain professionals. much better positioned to knock Apple on it's head. heck, we could even make xbox ones on a nokia line...

Anonymous said...

Microsoft market capitalization to go down by $7 billion on Tuesday.

Anonymous said...

I feel sorry for all the Nokia employees. I hope they get to know this blog soon and make their escape sooner than later.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile it looks more and more like XBox One will be half-baked.

Half-baked? Maybe the name is totally right: Xbox One will sudddenly make 360 looks 359 times better! The situation is embarassing. The Xbox half-alive is constantly updating...

That is what you get by taking all the leftovers from Windows+DevDiv and joining with the leftovers from previous Xbox versions that couldn't get a job elsewhere...

Anonymous said...

Amazing; 40% of Nokia employees just earned a 4 or 5. We just need the random number generator to run long enough to find out exactly which ones.

Anonymous said...

MS have bought Nokia. Or, MS have just welcomed Elop back into the fold...

Anonymous said...

I like how Steve makes the Nokia announcement after our 2013 grants were struck on August 31st, and as of right now MS stock is down 3% (more than most of our raises). Thanks Steve

Anonymous said...

Interesting comments at http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1lmcd6/microsoft_to_acquire_nokia_devices_services/

Anonymous said...

Does anyone have information on the status of the parallel data warehouse (PDW) product, formerly DATallergo (purchased by MS in 2008)?

Cancellation rumors abound and it really did not have a client-base when purchased so would not be too surprising - HP collaboration or not.

Anonymous said...

I like how Steve makes the Nokia announcement after our 2013 grants were struck on August 31st, and as of right now MS stock is down 3% (more than most of our raises). Thanks Steve

I am impressed ... he even figured out a way to neutralize the post-SB bounce.

Anonymous said...

"I like how Steve makes the Nokia announcement after our 2013 grants were struck on August 31st, and as of right now MS stock is down 3% (more than most of our raises). Thanks Steve"

Worried about 6% decline in stock price for your stock grants on a day like today when probably one of the biggest changes in MS history is announced? Really?

If that is the mentality of the even a fraction of the employees at MS then a 6% should have another zero added to it.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of Win 8 and metro, I purchased a new computer over the weekend. After stumbling around trying to find how to open more than one file window to copy files from my thumb drives (where the hell did "my computer" go?), the final frosting on my Win 8 shit pie experience was trying to shut down and restart my computer for upgrades. WTF, where the hell is the restart button? Really, how is moving the start button and restart and shutdown buttons a better consumer experience? I finally found a way of shutting down my computer but still don't know how to just restart it.

Epic, epic fail.

Sorry softies, I love all my ex co-workers who are many of the smartest, most motivated people in the world but really, Win 8 is just wrong. Please stand up, revolt and take back your company.

Anonymous said...

On this day of big announcements, why not make one more of them and announce the end of the current review system? Even if all they did was revert back to what it was pre-2011 or pre-2006 (before LB started messing with it) the whole company would do a happy dance.

How can they continue to support something that almost every employee hates and, much worse, hasn't worked? The system is surely not responsible for all our problems. But the changes to it coincide pretty closely to the points in time (2006 and 2011) where things started trending downward in terms of our market position and when we were planning what turned out to be huge mistakes (Vista, Win 8).

In our system, no one wants to be too vocal in their disagreement for fear of being ranked low. Even when speaking up could keep us from epic public embarrassment when products fail.

Anonymous said...

Nobody wanted to speak against Kim Jong-il. That's just not the way it worked. As a result, smart ideas from good people just got buried.

Anonymous said...

Fire Lisa Brummel and she can take her !@#$%^ stack rank system with her. Fire Kevin Turner for being a tiny-minded self-serving idiot who thinks Microsoft is Walmart. Fire everyone who came from Walmart.

Announce a large stock buy-back (say, $40 billion over two years).

Give a decent-sized stock grant (say in the $30,000 range) to all employees below level 66. Give new cash bonus to employees, around 20% of base (before Nokia swells the count by 1/3), to take down that hoarded cash level a little. Fully fund those horrific HSA accounts with employer funds. Re-rank everyone who did something useful in the past year, instead of getting stuck with the rank that had to do with who-knows-who.

Buy another company to go with the announced Nokia purchase, maybe buy one every month for a while. Rescind the board seat offer to the activist fund manager guy - who cares about him and his stockholder demands. How many shares of stock are held by MSFT employees? Can we demand a seat or two on the board, based on our collective stock ownership percentage? Just because someone has enough money to buy a few shares of stock, does not qualify them to sit on the board of directors. Balmer owns double the stock of this "activist investor" - why does that guy get to be listened to, is the unofficial rep for all of the institutional funds that hold MSFT stock? If they don't like the performance of MSFT stock, they should sell it, not make demands on how the company should function.

Recap of Priority One: Fire Kevin Turner and Lisa Brummel.

Anonymous said...

So Microsoft buys Nokia... and with it the replacement for Ballmer. Elop get's his reward for at least preventing Windows Phone disappearing without a ripple. (Contrary to others comments, I think it's a great phone O/S, it's just a shame so many consumers and reviewers write it off without trying it)

I suppose Elop is quite a bargain, looking at the cost of the Nokia deal, especially compared to Skype / Bates.

So what do you think the big things Elop is going to do when he takes over?
- Split up Microsoft / Spin off parts?
- Change the just changed organizational structure?
- Replace the stack rank system with something that actually incentivizes people to work for the good of the company?
- Add traditional PCs to the Microsoft device portfolio? (hey, blue sky thinking here...)
- Do something to keep the OEMs from totally moving to Google?
- Something ground breaking and genuinely innovative?

Anonymous said...

Also super pissed that the Nokia buy announcement has dropped the stock price today, agree that it is b.s. that it happened the day after pricing on the paltry new stock grant for the year. So, not only is the new grant worth less than the pathetic dollar value, the vested shares are worth less - which we have to sell in order to pay property tax and cover a few more expenses. Stock grants were supposed to be something that made you want to stay through the 5-years it takes for them to vest - lol on that one. The small bonus will pay for a few things we need to replace (washing machine, dishwasher, etc.), but it sure as heck doesn't give any sense of financial security, or a reason to to a good job this year. Soooooooooo wish we had the FU money.

Anonymous said...

Return to our original plans of world domination.

But this time, not by intimidation, blackmail, strong arming, or hostile takeovers, but by making it so that either all other companies want to merge with Microsoft, or their employees all want to leave and join Microsoft.

How do we do that if we don't have mind-control technology?

By focusing on improving the internal working environment - if successful, then absorption of all companies under the sun will come as a natural side-effect. And the degree of success will determine the speed of world domination ;)

Anonymous said...

so microsoft bought a bunch of manufacturing businesses and hardware-design shops with heavy losses and rapidly declining revenue (most of it still tied to the dying feature phone market) for close to 8 billions, yet didn't get anything out of nokia in term of patent and mapping technologies, instead, all ms got was 10 year license deal in exchange for more than 2 billions.

I must say this is a lousy deal for microsoft. at least when skype was purchased, ms got the whole thing and everything behind, not just the front shell.

Anonymous said...

"Come on folks, the choice is clear: MARLENA WERDER for CEO. She laughs at managers who can't perform a physical task (Duke offsite 2008), and also likes to remove long time employees who are over 55 (she did it at IBM). A leader with vision."
Yes indeedy. The chief of the Charlotte Mafia would be a fine choice. Head office would move to Mumbai.

Anonymous said...

coming back to this discussion. my money is on elop being the next in line. going to nokia and coming back was probably part of the master plan.

Anonymous said...

Leaving aside the commercial wisdom or lack thereof of the Nokia acquisition, how on earth did the board approve it? I mean you have a lame-duck CEO with a history of overpaying for underperforming assets, making decision to spend $7billion.

Of course there is an explanation. Elop will be nominated as CEO, there will be a 'transition period', SteveB will step down and and be nominated to the board. Steve's hand will be inside the Elop puppet, and nothing will change.

Reminds me of Vladimir Putin, from president to prime minister and back again.

Good luck to you all.

Anonymous said...

The greater the number of butterflies flapping their wings, the more unpredictable the future becomes.

- Ancient Internet Saying

Anonymous said...

"Can we demand a seat or two on the board, based on our collective stock ownership percentage?"

Excellent idea-- too excellent.

Next you'll be wanting a union, which is anathema to the model of massive asymmetry you now enjoy. Employees milling around here as a disorganized rabble of individual voices in the wilderness a perfect scenario for making your hated review system ineradicable. You're at the behest of an actual constituency, subject to whatever arbitrary, capricious whims enter the heads of that cohesive group.

Best of luck to each and every one of you all by your individual selves, as this historical reenactment proceeds.

Anonymous said...

I think the song from the musical Scrooge is more appropriate (depending who they bring in): "Thank you very much! Thank you very much! That's the nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me.."

Anonymous said...

The guy who failed to save Nokia is now going to be in charge of saving the new Microsoft (with 100% organic real chunks of Nokia inside). It obviously makes perfect sense. You'd have to be an imbecile to not see the brilliance there.



Anonymous said...

From what I've heard it sounds like Elop has done the best he could with the mess Nokia was in when he got there. The existing in-house OS platforms were never going to take off and there was no alternative but to pick a third party OS for their next generation smartphones. Picking Android would have put them in an all out slugging match with Samsung with little differentiation and no real partner to help with marketing, etc.

Going with Microsoft at least gave them a solid partner who would pore gobs of cash into marketing support.

In the end, neither option was likely to lead to significant market success. Switching to adopt a 3rd party OS this late in the game (with entrenched competitors) was always going to be a hail Mary play.

That said, I don't see why it makes sense for Microsoft to pour billions into a loser. The combination of two companies in trouble doesn't equal a healthier firm.

Anonymous said...

Assuming Elop does become the next MS CEO, I wonder how long it'll be before another 'Burning Platform' memo goes out?

Anonymous said...

Microsoft isn't done. They will acquire Dell next. The question is, will Michael Dell become CEO or Stephen Elop? One can only hope that once submerged like this, JLG won't float to the top of the pond again....

Anonymous said...

So what do you think the big things Elop is going to do when he takes over?
- Split up Microsoft / Spin off parts?
- Change the just changed organizational structure?
- Replace the stack rank system with something that actually incentivizes people to work for the good of the company?
- Add traditional PCs to the Microsoft device portfolio? (hey, blue sky thinking here...)
- Do something to keep the OEMs from totally moving to Google?
- Something ground breaking and genuinely innovative?

Let's see, no, no, no, no, no, and no. One Steve for another it would seem....

Anonymous said...

Do something that will make MSFT tank. Engineer a buyout of MS by Juniper Networks. Then tank Juniper Networks, followed by a buyout by Adobe, etc etc as the entire rabbit-hole unwinds.

Inception in the tech industry until we finally wake from his dream...

Anonymous said...

We cannot have a performance review system that is gamed by managers, who hides behind lies and rigs the reviews to get rid of good people that threaten them with great performance. How can we have a system where the manager is a filter and it does not matter how excellent the feedback from your peers, and people across the company you get… and most importantly, achieving the commitments you both agreed upon at the beginning of the FY. The manager can always “fabricate” new feedback and never tell you where it comes from... they try to hide their incompetence. Get rid of the people behind the system! We might still keep some good people that are left around the company.

Anonymous said...

Can we get some examples of those hilarious stories please???

Anonymous said...

32,000 new Microsofties! This blog needs to be re-named to Maxi-Microsoft. Mini, you having trouble sleeping at night these days?

Anonymous said...

What else are you going to do when you have a great, big pile of cash sitting offshore? If you bring it back home you'll lose 30% or so in tax. Might as well buy some trinkets.
The cash pile is in the 10s of billions. Buying with un-repatriated revenue is effectively getting a 30% discount.
Skype, Nokia... what else has Europe to offer?

Anonymous said...

What else are you going to do when you have a great, big pile of cash sitting offshore? If you bring it back home you'll lose 30% or so in tax. Might as well buy some trinkets.
The cash pile is in the 10s of billions. Buying with un-repatriated revenue is effectively getting a 30% discount.
Skype, Nokia... what else has Europe to offer?

Anonymous said...

The secret plan is to save up enough cash until you can do a hostile takeover of yourself ;)

Anonymous said...

> What else are you going to do when you have a great, big pile of cash sitting offshore? If you bring it back home you'll lose 30% or so in tax.

And if you use it to purchase Nokia you'll lose 100% or so buying a turd.

Anonymous said...

Does anybody else cringe at Ballmer's dismissive and insulting "blah blah blah"? Someone will ask him a substantive, serious, and sincere question and he just bellows "that and that, it's all junk, blah blah blah". It drives me crazy.

I don't really think Steve is stupid, he's just completely self-deluded and out of touch with reality. Oh, and knows nothing about software.

By way of example. Ballmer had two big announcements to make in the last few weeks. He knew that reducing the stock price before Aug 30 would help employees by reducing their immediate tax liability and their long term tax liability by (YourMarginalRate - 20%) and cost Microsoft nothing. It would also increase the long term value of new grants, which does cost Microsoft but that's spread over years. He also knew that increasing the stock price after Aug 30 would help employees get more immediate value if needed from their vesting grants.

Now I just can't believe that Ballmer sequenced these announcements to intentionally screw employees who whine about wanting the Start Menu back. That's a bridge of malice too far.


What are we left with? Ballmer actually believed, just as strongly as he believes in his other fantasies, that (A) MSFT would crash when he announced his retirement and (B) MSFT would skyrocket on news of buying Nokia.


Q.E.D. --- Completely and utterly self-deluded.

Anonymous said...

Mahesh Unnikrishnan (maheshu) for CEO.

Anonymous said...

I received my second 4 this year after doing really well on all commitments as well as getting all positive feedback. The justification was "you don't have enough visibility". I guess it could be worse, two other people in my team got 5's and were let go.

Anonymous said...

received my second 4 this year after doing really well on all commitments as well as getting all positive feedback. The justification was "you don't have enough visibility". I guess it could be worse, two other people in my team got 5's and were let go

What you have to understand is that the layoffs already started. You also have been told to leave, and you are just choosing not to listen... Go quickly, before all those positions at Amazon are filled. We now know for sure who the new CEO is. Ballmer has even proved once more in his way out what everyone already knew: the best way to get a promotion at Microsoft is to leave and come up!

If you stay, with 2 scores of 4 in a row, there is no future. Even people with far better records will have to go. Just think: after Windows 8.1 goes into maintenance, it is now a dead OS. All focus now should go into mobile if this company wants to survive. Same can be said about Xbox: finish it (it will clearly ship unfinished!), do a small Roku-competitor, and then nothing. Server-side is not better. As already cited, several teams work on the same things: monitoring, deployment, etc. This has to stop. And things are not better at Surface, SQL, Office 365, etc. Microsoft has a lot of redundancy, and that is Elop's first job: to clean the field for growth. I believe that he'll eventually change the review system. Yet, those with a 4 or 5 are tagged forever. A even worse if that is the last ever score in your record.

Summary: go quickly, before all the people upset with a 3 score decide to jump ship!

Anonymous said...

Just keep in mind that this acquisition will ultimately result in downsizing/layoffs. But you knew that, right?

Oh, and by the way: Manufacturing? Really? WTF. Sometimes I weep when I think about how MS operates. It's pitiful.

The only worse acquisition I can imagine that's been bandied about on these pages would have been Dell. FFS. That would be a shit storm disaster.

Elop as CEO? More of the same, sadly. And not worth $7B.

The shark has long since been jumped, I'm afraid, and we're all still here. I can barely get indignant about the future of MS any longer. Thinking about the cluster that's coming in the next few months is just tiring.

Anonymous said...

Are the consultants reserving all the conference rooms and roaming the halls talking about 10X and synergies yet?

Anonymous said...

> > > Are the consultants reserving all the conference rooms


I'd love to see The Bobs interview a Microsoft PM.

" So you write the specs?"

" Yes... Uh no. I mean sometimes the devs do that."

.....


"I HAVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT SKILLS. I AM GOOD AT DEALING WITH THE PROJECT!"

Anonymous said...

"Next you'll be wanting a union, which is anathema to the model of massive asymmetry you now enjoy. Employees milling around here as a disorganized rabble of individual voices in the wilderness a perfect scenario for making your hated review system ineradicable. You're at the behest of an actual constituency, subject to whatever arbitrary, capricious whims enter the heads of that cohesive group.

Best of luck to each and every one of you all by your individual selves, as this historical reenactment proceeds."


The only thing worse than Microsoft's shit-can review system would be unionizing.

Unions destroy white collar creative jobs by taking away any incentive to do more than the minimum -- if you want your work life to be like it is at Boeing, where engineers punch clocks and are among the most lifeless dullards in all of the tech world, then by all means unionize.

The right answer, which people have been saying for years now, is to leave Microsoft because it's a shitty company and go to one of the LITERALLY THOUSANDS of other companies that aren't so shitty.

The only people at Microsoft whining about unions are the people who can't find work anywhere else and want to sit on their collective lazy asses doing nothing for the next 30 years.

Anonymous said...

Keep in mind that even without a masters degree, if you have 5 years of experience from PREVIOUS jobs, you can file for EB2 and get a green card within a year.

So if you are not from India/China, leaving Microsoft could get you a green card very fast since you can't count experience from current employer.

Anonymous said...

Founded in 1920 by two socialist parties whose total membership did not exceed a few thousand in order to stimulate and undertake the kind of activities described, this organization grew in the course of the next generation to the point where its affiliated enterprises accounted in the 1950s for nearly one-fourth of gross national product of Israel and employed the same proportion of the labor force, its trade unions affiliated 90 percent of the workers by hand and by brain, and its health insurance service embraced two-thirds of the total population. So powerful did this Workers Society become that some of its leaders claimed for it parity with or even priority over the state.

Anonymous said...

"Founded in 1920 by two socialist parties whose total membership did not exceed a few thousand in order to stimulate and undertake the kind of activities described, this organization grew in the course of the next generation to the point where its affiliated enterprises accounted in the 1950s for nearly one-fourth of gross national product of Israel and employed the same proportion of the labor force, its trade unions affiliated 90 percent of the workers by hand and by brain, and its health insurance service embraced two-thirds of the total population. So powerful did this Workers Society become that some of its leaders claimed for it parity with or even priority over the state."

Was there a point to this post?

Anonymous said...

Ah vision, that certain je ne sai quoi that everyone dreams about from a CEO, and they assign it to one retroactively, but in reality, vision is only 20/20 in hindsight.

When the blind leadeth the blind, get out of the way.

Anonymous said...

> they do not control what will happen at stack ranking meetings above their own hierarchical level. They might think they’ve given somebody a 2 and find out that as reviews got aggregated the guy ended up with a 4. It wasn’t the manager’s decision but he or she still has to justify it in the feedback they have to write.

cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. people may sometimes feel "disequilibrium": frustration, hunger, dread, guilt, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, the distressing mental state that people feel when they "find themselves doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Stack ranking, lowering morale for everyone since the dawn of the modern era ;)

Anonymous said...

stop complaining and start working smart.

Anonymous said...

Unions destroy white collar creative jobs by taking away any incentive to do more than the minimum -- if you want your work life to be like it is at Boeing, where engineers punch clocks and are among the most lifeless dullards in all of the tech world, then by all means unionize.

I don't know where you got that idea about Boeing. The engineers that I know at Boeing tell me it is very a stressful place to work.

Anonymous said...

Sometimes maybe even the bare minimum is very stressful, and a little above the bare minimum is karōshi.

Anonymous said...

Actually, without unions, Boeing would be a hellish place to work, kinda like Microsoft, and they would have gone under long ago.

So say your thanks to unions, such as the doctor's union (AMA) and the lawyer's union (the bar).

Anonymous said...

Actually, without unions, Boeing would be a hellish place to work, kinda like Microsoft, and they would have gone under long ago.

So say your thanks to unions, such as the doctor's union (AMA) and the lawyer's union (the bar).

Anonymous said...

If planes were built like software (especially MICROSOFT software) there is no way in hell i would ever get on one.

Anonymous said...

I think those Boeing engineers who design and build airplanes that safely transport passengers over millions of miles every day must be having quite a laugh being called "lifeless dullards" by people who can't even write an email server that doesn't crap all over itself at least once a month.

Anonymous said...

Next month, Microsoft to announce purchase of Boeing. Pilots to begin retraining to use Metro interface.

Anonymous said...

"cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions"

Why you cognitive rascal, you! Except George Orwell put it best when defining "doublethink":

"Doublethink is the act of ordinary people simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.[1] Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Somewhat related but almost the opposite is cognitive dissonance, where contradictory beliefs cause conflict in one's mind. Doublethink is notable due to a lack of cognitive dissonance — thus the person is completely unaware of any conflict or contradiction.
George Orwell coined the word doublethink in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); doublethink is part of newspeak. In the novel, its origin within the typical citizen is unclear; while it could be partly a product of Big Brother's formal brainwashing programs,[2] the novel explicitly shows people learning Doublethink and newspeak due to peer pressure and a desire to "fit in", or gain status within the Party — to be seen as a loyal Party Member. In the novel, while to even recognize, much less mention any contradiction within the context of the Party line was akin to blasphemy and subject to possible disciplinary action. More certain was the instant social disapproval of fellow Party Members."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

Gotcha, MoFu.

Anonymous said...

stop complaining, start working smart and save msft.

Anonymous said...

No wait. Don't you mean cognitive dissident?

Anonymous said...

"...where engineers punch clocks and are among the most lifeless dullards..."

Here's a thought: go to Everett and stand in front of the Boeing entrance gate with a sign repeating what you wrote here. Find out if Boeing employees are --really-- lifeless. :-)

Organization bad. Disorganization good. But for whom?



Anonymous said...

For sure, if you want Microsoft management to know and care* what you're thinking then keep talking about a union. Just ask your equally influential colleagues at WalMart, or Jack in the Box.

*Not likely in a good way.

Anonymous said...

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Anonymous said...

Making massive machines fly? Booooooring.
But spending your day making animated tiles, now that's cool.

Anonymous said...

@ Wednesday, September 04, 2013 8:05:00 PM

I condescendingly dissent. So there.

- Eric Arthur Blair

Anonymous said...

According to Cringely (yes, I know... but he's at least as good as anyone here so far) the Smart People are still running Microsoft and have a Plan.
http://www.cringely.com/2013/09/03/microsoft-really-bought-nokia/

It sounds at least as rational as most of the posting here.

Anonymous said...

anyone out there who made it to senior band in < 2 years? Wondering if doing the time in your level is all BS?

Anonymous said...

anyone out there who made it to senior band in < 2 years? Wondering if doing the time in your level is all BS?

Pure BS. If your manager wants you to grow, he/she will give you clear and continuous feedback during the year. If you have a bad manager, you will not receive any feedback during the year, and at review time get BS like this, and the "you need more visibility" excuse.

Obviously, your manager also has other things to do, and real people have good and bad days. Yet, I've been lucky to have mostly good managers in 10+ years at Microsoft. I have a promotion velocity a little over 0.51, and went from 61 to 65 in about 6 years. I'm down to earth enough to tell you I didn't do anything exceptional: just worked well on the right things, with very good direction from my management.

If you are getting this poor excuse as a surprise at review time, just recognize you have a bad manager and run away.

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...
stop complaining, start working smart and save msft.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013 7:06:00 PM"


I don't dismiss the sincerity of this poster, but there's a real cancer in management that neutralizes working smart. I really think the problem is that upper management knows nothing about software.

I remember a debate with BillG at my new-hire party. This was back in day when there the new-hire group was small (held in that Petroleum museum place above Pine and Bellevue in Capitol Hill). I was questioning the potential market of NT based on the niche market status of UNIX at the time (1990) and whether this was a lucrative direction for Microsoft (fool I was). Gates turned my question around and immediately blasted a dozen questions my way that obliterated all my premises. He understood not just the market but the technical issues involved far better than I.

Those days are gone. We're a software company run by people who know nothing about software.

Pathetic

Anonymous said...

Actually I couldn't tell if the "working smart" comment was sarcasum or not.

Unless you count gaming the system as working smart.

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...
stop complaining, start working smart and save msft.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013 7:06:00 PM"


So naïve it hurts.

Do you honestly believe that, over the last decade, nobody among the 90,000 people at Microsoft has attempted to save the company by any means we could? Or that, as a regular employee, you could possibly have any meaningful impact on a management culture as malignantly cancerous as the one we work under?

Full disclosure: I say "we" here, but I finally left a year ago after spending the last 10 years of my 17 year tenure trying to do my part to "save" the company.

The whole notion that the issue is "working smarter" is silly. The problem is fundamental to the way Microsoft segments employees and encourages everyone to focus on nothing but individual success through promotions and rewards designed around a "last person standing" philosophy. The "partner bench" and similar ill-conceived king-building structures have allowed the worst people to rise to the top.

"Working smart" isn't part of this conversation.

Anonymous said...

"I think those Boeing engineers who design and build airplanes that safely transport passengers over millions of miles every day must be having quite a laugh being called "lifeless dullards" by people who can't even write an email server that doesn't crap all over itself at least once a month."

I don't believe the OP was talking about the quality of work Boeing engineers do, but rather the conditions they work under. Perhaps the "lifeless dullards" comment was a bit harsh, but having known quite a few Boeing technical employees it's not an environment most of us would choose.

Every aspect of work life at Boeing is controlled and there is very little personal freedom or creativity. While a structured and controlled environment might help ensure that everyone is thinking the same to minimize deadly errors, it also seems to sap personality from those who have worked in the environment for any length of time. Boeing people tend to dress the same, talk the same and think the same... not all that different from the military, actually.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather ship buggy software as part of a creative, fun and flexible culture than spend my days working in governmental-grey cubes where everyone conforms to exactly the same expectations.

Anonymous said...

I never worked at DEC as some people posting here have, but I did work at Amdahl and always had a feeling of deja vu when I worked at Microsoft.

I remember celebrating our biggest year ever in 1990 passing $1 billion in sales and then beginning the first RIF (reduction in force) less than 2 years later which was only the beginning of a never ending series of RIFs that gutted the company.

Amdahl had plenty of smart people yet their business went down the tubes at an astonishing rate in the 1990s. Amdahl employees weren't stupid. They saw that commodity Unix and PC servers were destroying their business. There were serious attempts to get into both these new business areas.

Unfortunately, the company had been designed around a business model and cost structure that simply didn't work for these new businesses.

Microsoft is in the same place. There are plenty of smart people there who fully understand things are going wrong. Unfortunately, there is nothing they can do to fix the sinking ship. The Windows and Office business model are a disease that infects everything else the company touches.

It would be so much easier to find a new strategy if Windows and Office stopped selling. Then there could be no arguments about cannibalization.

Here's to hoping that Windows fails fast.

Anonymous said...

> > > I'd rather ship buggy software as part of a creative, fun and flexible culture

Except for "buggy", none of these adjectives seem to apply when talking about Microsoft.

Anonymous said...

Except for "buggy", none of these adjectives seem to apply when talking about Microsoft.

Lol
I'm sure there may still be some creative, fun, and flexible groups left at MS. All you have to do is talk to some trusted friends, cast out a wider net, find out which ones they are, then sabotage them to make sure you rise up in the curve again xD

Anonymous said...

Well, they should only be sabotaged when they're poaching your best guys. If you can get your underperformers to retire to those greener pastures, then they are no longer your problem.

But then if the underperformers start thriving in those new groups, some sabotage may indeed be necessary to protect your fiefdom. It may be easy for low level guys to move there, but another PUM?

Anonymous said...

Well, they should only be sabotaged when they're poaching your best guys.

Have you seen the latest Hard Code column on permissible poaching? Among some dubious statistics (like doings 96 informationals per hire!) there is an attack on the integrity of those asking for or accepting to perform informal loops.

The level of delusion in the company is really pathetic (or is that just self-serving advice from a manager in Xbox afraid of losing people?!). Meanwhile, at the top principal and partner levels, everyone knows that interview loops within Microsoft are a formality. People at such levels only move if they are sure they know several friends in the new team. At times it is impossible to even organize an interview loop if all the friends excuse themselves of interviewing a candidate!

Anonymous said...

MARLENA WERDER for CEO

Anonymous said...

The cash pile is in the 10s of billions. Buying with un-repatriated revenue is effectively getting a 30% discount.
Skype, Nokia... what else has Europe to offer?


[Opens coat] I have the London bridge for sale. Don't tell anyone else. It's exclusive and you look like an fine example of an American. I want to only sell to you.

Anonymous said...

I received my second 4 this year after doing really well on all commitments as well as getting all positive feedback. The justification was "you don't have enough visibility". I guess it could be worse, two other people in my team got 5's and were let go.

No, they were the lucky ones. They were forced to confront the reality that things sucked and they were just as complcit by staying and making a run at it. Call them in 3 months and see if they have any regrets, then wake up and quit yourself.

Anonymous said...

"stop complaining, start working smart and save msft"

translation via Google:

stop complaining=complaining is useless, many people will not hear you and most of the managers will not listen to you.

start working smart=think about yourself, your life and your dearest ones; remember: in many cases, corporate internal communications are worse than communism propaganda

save msft=by all means, shake the culture

Anonymous said...

How does one shake the culture when nobody else is listening?

Anonymous said...

How does one shake the culture when nobody else is listening?

I believe the meaning was, "Get out of Microsoft so that it's toxic culture doesn't poison you." That kind of "shake".

Anonymous said...

http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-saga-of-king-ballmer/864659

Anonymous said...

Kind of like those trying to escape across the Berlin Wall then?

Anonymous said...

The review system at Microsoft comes for everyone eventually.

It's easy to dodge a 4 or 5 for a few years, especially if you are good.

Try doing it for 20 years straight as you rise through the levels and the comparisons get tougher (and they will, big time).

It comes for everyone.

Everyone.

Anonymous said...

>>anyone out there who made it to senior band in < 2 years? Wondering if doing the time in your level is all BS?

Gone are the days when moving to senior band in < 2 years was super difficult. If you have good promotion velocity and consistently delivering then moving from 62 to 63 in 2 years is very doable. I have seen numerous cases in last year or so.

Anonymous said...

There will be no Microsoft Spring.

Winter is coming.

Anonymous said...

The thing that will ultimately end stack ranking, if the new CEO and HR VP don't end it first, is its costs.

How much money in manager salaries does MS spend per year just to do the stack ranking? How many FTE equivs would that be? A big investment used to run a destructive review process that isn't instead being used to make and market better products. Also, competitors, who don't do this, are outperforming MS. Pretty hard to keep defending the process.

Anonymous said...

First, hurrah! Stack. Rank. Finally. Produced something good! Second, if you ever worked for any SLT person, you know that KT is the insider. It's what the SLT is dreading openly and discussing loudly enough for even 2 levels down to hear. KT WAS BROUGHT IN FOR THIS! Reduce cost of monopoly operations, and maintain full billing by MCS. Even Kevin admitted in during his initial round-tables- less product but more predictable product deployments in the field...this was his roundtable mantra. He even got gooey about his long time dance with coming over to us, tearing him away from his roots. Anyway, so glad to see the review process finally catch the right casualty, instead of decent 65s and 66s who's only mistake is to pick the wrong GM or VP or projects.
If I could pick one instead of KT, which I cannot, then I would definietely pick an insider like Dave Thompson or Satya.

Anonymous said...



The review system at Microsoft comes for everyone eventually.

It's easy to dodge a 4 or 5 for a few years, especially if you are good.

Try doing it for 20 years straight as you rise through the levels and the comparisons get tougher (and they will, big time).

It comes for everyone.

Everyone.


But before it comes for you, you'll be folded, spindled, exhausted, and emotionally mutilated. You'll work harder, longer. You'll hear praise from your manager, and then get stabbed in the back at review time. The sword of Damocles will hang over your neck. The stress may make you sick. If it does, you can well expect to be let go for being unable to do the work. You'll lose your insurance that day, when you need it the most, and have to navigate COBRA on your own without a useful guide.

There's life after Microsoft. When the writing starts to appear on the wall - when you get 'not working up to level' no matter what you do - leave before it hurts you. Because they really don't care if you get hurt.

Anonymous said...

Keep in mind that even without a masters degree, if you have 5 years of experience from PREVIOUS jobs, you can file for EB2 and get a green card within a year.

So if you are not from India/China, leaving Microsoft could get you a green card very fast since you can't count experience from current employer.


And that is why I'm still here. Just 1.5 years to go, and I will be free from the msft culture!

Anonymous said...

Got a surprise 4 this year. Reason given is that I'm a good IC but a bad lead. No such feedback was given through the year, and even now, my manager hasn't been able to give any examples where I should have done something differently.

In past reviews when I was a lead, I have gotten 20% and "Strong". In 3 of the last 6 years, got 20%, and got a gold star award in 2010. My work this year has been at a comparable level.

I'm leaving MS at the end of the week. It's a bitter end to what has basically been a happy 10 years at MSFT.

Anonymous said...

What our company needs is a serious culture shift. Until that happens we're not going anywhere. Sadly the group that could make this happen (HR) is filled with bullies and backstabbers. It's time for a change and what better place to start.

Anonymous said...

Gone are the days when moving to senior band in < 2 years was super difficult. If you have good promotion velocity and consistently delivering then moving from 62 to 63 in 2 years is very doable.


I was eyeing one year but obviously that didn't happen. I was really eyeing one year for 61->62 and when that didn't happen, I knew 62->63 in one year was a very long shot.

Compensation wise, I think I am on top of the band (or very close to it) and I have had two 1s. Manager says better to wait, get a 2 then get a 3 in the next band and suffer.

Anonymous said...

I left MS a few months ago I wouldn't go back for any price. Horrible management, bad review system, incompetent/evil coworkers, hilariously undercompensated. I was like how I see many current MS employees. Hands firmly over their ears yelling that things will get better next year. Things can get MUCH better NOW if you start looking for a new gig.

Oh and to whoever the new CEO is: fire the shit out of Brummel.

Anonymous said...

No comment...
"In other Microsoft Corp. news, SVP Lisa E. Brummel unloaded 64,238 shares of the company’s stock on the open market in a transaction dated Tuesday, September 10th. The stock was sold at an average price of $32.32, for a total transaction of $2,076,172.16. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at this link."

Disgruntled SharePoint Guy said...

Level 65 here. Just shy of 17 years. I quit last week to go to Salesforce. "Devices and Services" = worst strategy ever. And the "3 strike rule" just proves that Kevin Turner is the worst exec we ever hired. Good luck Microsoft, time for me to go somewhere that "gets it".

Anonymous said...

And there it is. Exit song: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4779036/exclusive-video-steve-ballmers-intense-tearful-goodbye-to-microsoft

Anonymous said...

I don't know if Ballmer leaving would do anything for MSFT, after all the guy really loves the company, he definitely did what he believed was good for MSFT. I don't have that kind of faith in anyone else in the leadership team in MSFT, Terry or others - they all seem to do it for themselves. It is never about what you deliver, but other things that should not even be important. All the company does these days is reorg and change, and repeatedly make the mistakes that could have been avoided. The egoistic mentality of some of the people who believe them to be Gods can drive anyone crazy.

Anonymous said...

And... Review model has been scrapped! Woohoo!

Anonymous said...

Hey Mini -

Now what?

Anonymous said...

Hey Mini - are we going to be discussing this? http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579193951987616572

Anonymous said...

BIG NEWS. Wall Street Journal reports stack ranking at Microsoft just died.

I thought I'd come here for some insightful analysis and comments... but I see this blog died a long time ago. Too bad.

Anonymous said...

still no article or comments on recent news regarding death of ranking system ?!

Anonymous said...

No new blog article from Mini on the death of stack racking...?

Unknown said...

Microsoft thought to be preparing to appoint Satya Nadella as CEO

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/31/microsoft-ceo-ballmer-satya-nadella-gates

Unknown said...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/31/microsoft-ceo-ballmer-satya-nadella-gates

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