The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Management

Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by Oggle on Sunday July 06, 2025 @08:28PM (#44485467)

Microsoft definitely does underpay the market significantly! Like 60% of what other companies of the same level pay, unless you're in the Copilot org. Maybe you'll get a little bit higher.

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by paxys on Sunday July 06, 2025 @10:26PM (#44486165)

The majority of Microsoft employees are in Seattle/Redmond, which has no state taxes and a lower cost of living than the Bay Area, so it isn’t a straightforward comparison.

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by Arainach on Sunday July 06, 2025 @10:31PM (#44486195)

It's a straightforward comparison in the area. Below Principal/Staff, Microsoft's stock awards are a (very unfunny) joke and their comp is pretty meh.

I left in 2018. I was 63 (first level senior) and had offers from Google and Meta for a downlevel (L4) at a 40% increase in total comp. The gap has closed slightly in the last 7 years but not much at those levels.

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by dshacker on Sunday July 06, 2025 @10:39PM (#44486255)

Same experience for me, I still remember at IC1 getting 7k stocks over 5 years as my "stock bonus" for the year. which meant getting 1 or 2 MSFT stock every 4 months :D

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by wbl on Sunday July 06, 2025 @08:50PM (#44485604)

What companies do you think are at that level?

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by int_19h on Sunday July 06, 2025 @10:11PM (#44486075)

Google, Facebook, Amazon.

Amazon is in the same ballpark AFAIK, but the other two have noticeably better comp. The "Microsoft deal", such as it is, was that it's a place where you don't have to grind hard. This has changed now though.

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by marssaxman on Monday July 07, 2025 @08:20AM (#44489599)

It certainly didn't work that way for me, back in the late 2000s - my stint at Microsoft was the most exhausting grind of my career.

The common wisdom at the time was that different divisions of Microsoft had widely varying cultures, with as much difference as you'd expect to see between unrelated companies, so perhaps that was just DevDiv.

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Re:The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Manage... by int_19h on Monday July 07, 2025 @01:17PM (#44492513)

I was in DevDiv myself. From what I heard, Azure was where the grinding was at its worst.

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