Yeah, I was afraid of generalizing throughout the company. I think compared to other companies it seems to have a benefit of being more "nice". Maybe it's mostly targeted towards tech roles at that?

I think everyone should dissuade themselves of the concept that such a thing as a "nice" company really truly exists. I've worked at close to 10 companies in my career both public and private.

Some of the companies I've worked the big "family" culture and "our people are our greatest asset" company principles were the ones to do the deepest and swiftest cuts. Meanwhile their supposedly comparatively ruthless shark infested competitors keep on keeping on.

The people I saw most impacted by this were the ones that took the culture both literally and seriously, staying in the big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.

> big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.

I think this is a great point. Lately this is number one thing I feel concerned about. Though paradoxically they are coming from different direction as pushing buzzword driven development too fast in process making stable products unstable, calling them out of date. And then getting rid of products along the people who worked on them as dead weight.

You thought MS was "nice"? WTF were you smoking?

Comparatively to other companies, (amazon meta) I feel like Microsoft is "nicer"

Been at MS 15 years, the unspoken “pact” is truthful.

Can't generalize based on one data point but it really was historically low-stress and low-toxicity in every part of the company I've interacted with in the past 8+ years. If it had been combative and high-stress like some of the past places I've worked I wouldn't have considered the inferior compensation acceptable.

It was true though. And yes, you're right in that things can vary a lot from org to org, but there's still a median, and "they pay less but it's more chill" described Microsoft pretty accurately until a few years ago.