Thursday, July 21, 2011

Microsoft FY11Q4 Results

(ring-ring, Mini, ring-ring)

How is this quarter shaping up? First of all, let's review some competitors:

  • IBM: Bang! Third base!
  • Google: Boom! Out of the park, home-run!
  • Apple: Ka-Blam! Out of the city. Game over!

We've already been given a small preview thanks to the Partner conference: good Windows 7 numbers and Windows Phone, as loved as it might be (especially compared to Android) just ain't selling much. And no one is holding out any hopes that current customers will see their Mango update until New Years.

The iPad continues to suck in consumer love and money... money that we'd prefer they send our way but there's nothing comparable for them to buy. Windows 8 ARM tablets? Sometime next year, but what we showed at All Things D is our take of squeezing an elephant into a VW bug. Here's some deep respect and chops to the folks doing all this work, but it's a subtraction game followed by many frustrating conversations about why it's okay not to have certain obvious things work... obviously. And I have to say it's fascinating watching Sinofsky wrangle the Windows organization in this long game of reshaping itself and the consequences it has for the rest of the company.

My one analyst question for today: when the hell is Bing going to stop losing money?!? It appears that the internal hiring spree has finally cooled down so that's good - the piling of warm bodies has stopped (well, only to be replaced by throwing warm bodies on The Cloud because, ah-huck, we're all in). Seriously though, now's the time to start shaking the Bing tree and let the goodness of the search eco-system keep on going and shed the remaining busy work. Come on, if Xbox did it, so can you!


Calibration cacophony: I owe a post about our new review system but I'm not going to put money down about when that's going to happen. In the meantime, I'd love to sit down with each and everyone of you that supposedly told LisaB that the previous review system, with its Exceeded and Achieved and its 20% this and 70% that, was just too durn hard to comprehend. Let's chat. This discuss (*whack* against the side of your head) your results for this year. I'd like to discuss (*whack*) what a peer relative result within a strict percentage based system means. As part of this discussion (*whack* *whack* *whack*) you'll learn that your results are less that what you're used to and the message and your rewards are strictly viewed through your percentile bucket, no matter if you're at the top of your bucket or the bottom. I do seem to have some feedback from your peers to discuss (*whack*) although the majority of it seems to spring from a glowingly content-free "I'll rub your back if you'll rub mine" point of view.

Be careful what you ask for, because the person listening might turn it into one big step backwards. Oh, and for some of you, here's a salary bump.


-- Comments

452 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   401 – 452 of 452
Anonymous said...

MSFT SDE with 12 years experience, left 2 months ago

Try have a searchable profile on dice.com. You'll have to screen out calls for contractor works manually but your profile will get hit by HR recruiters from other companies pretty quickly, especially in Silicon Valley areas. See http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_18676621

Also don't get too hung up on the "Golden Handcuff". A lot of the companies have sign up bonuses and restricted stock/options that are designed to replace the ones you lose when you leave.

Silicon Valley area is currently flush with new cash due to last rounds of IPOs/Venture/Private equity funding. As an example of the opportunities available right now, with only 2 months on my new job I've already been asked to interview other SDE/Architect/Lead 2-3 times weekly on average.

Anonymous said...

Sums it up: http://tanishqgoyal.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-sac-out-life-at-microsoft.html

Anonymous said...

Dev, generally top 30%. Got a good but clearly political review which had no real or useful resemblance to reality. It was nothing more than words justifying numbers. This system is sleazy. I could not recommend working at the big M under this system. If your group is terrible, you will still have 1s and 2s. If your group is superb, you will still have 4s and 5s. I pity the 4s and 5s on this team where everybody worked their heart out and will be screwed because Sinofsky loves a broken system. You cut the bottom 10% from our team: now you're cutting into and demoralizing muscle. Stop sabotaging a company I love.

Anonymous said...

Found out last week I will not be getting good review. Sadly this might be the end of my job at Microsoft. My reviews are always achieved or exceeded but with 7 leads in two years I think this bad review may be my undoing. I think I will be managed out even though in the last year I have successfully delivered products and code essential for the ones around me to be able to get good and great reviews. January (midyear) and March (transition) reiews were outstanding.

Anonymous said...

I'm 11yr exmsft. Just spoke with a 12yr 65 who's gotten nothing but top 10 or 4-5's (old scale) every year.. They just got a 1.. out of left field. No notice.. even after some Gold Star stuff this review period!! Looks like MSFT is out to get rid of experienced, valuable personnel in favor of what?.
It's amazing to me that in this time of great computing upheaval, with our competiors eating our lunch and breakfast and dinner, we're trying to be Walmart.

Microsoft is imploding.

Rome Burns. and SteveB is playing the fiddle.

Can someone please give LisaB, KevinT and SteveB a 1?

Who da'Punk said...

They just got a 1.. out of left field. No notice.. even after some Gold Star stuff this review period!! Looks like MSFT is out to get rid of experienced, valuable personnel in favor of what?

I'm sure there are lots of volunteers that would swap their score for this person's "1" !

Anonymous said...

A 1 is the best result so you're bringing your old callibration knowledge and negativity of having left MSFT here.

Nice try.

Next ....

Anonymous said...

"I'm 11yr exmsft. Just spoke with a 12yr 65 who's gotten nothing but top 10 or 4-5's (old scale) every year.. They just got a 1.. out of left field."

Did you mean they just got a 5?

Anonymous said...


1 (not 1+)
L63
P to 64
Major R&D Bonus
Otherwise the same fixed numbers as others.

Saturday, August 13, 2011 5:55:00 PM



Got my review today - a 1 ..
I believe the new system is better than the old.
Linking performance to actual results is a good thing, by the old system I would have been expecting Exceeded 70 and the 20% would be for the moon walkers (or management ass kissers).
I got a 1 because the ass kisser in the team didn't achieve the actual result. Our manager tried to get his pet an exception- it didn't work!
+ 1 for the new system

Sunday, August 14, 2011 10:11:00 AM


So, you two clowns got your numbers over the weekend, before the official start of review discussions on Aug. 15? Some trolls don't even bother to check the timestamp anymore.

Anonymous said...

There is series of recent comments where person thinks that '1' is worst score in new system. Obviously, it is one person trolling, who either does not work at MSFT, or is so clueless that cannot understand review system...

Anonymous said...

Your question about when Bing is going to stop losing money is really irrelevant. Bing is the future, and Office/Windows is the past.... bla bla bla ... My opinion: if you can throw $8.5 billion down the drain on a whim for Skype, you can sustain Bing for 4 more years (at which point they'd reach at least 20% an become profitable).
Part of me is praying to God we didn't hire somebody with this level of IQ. Part of me knows better - having interfaced with our Bing colleagues.
1) The tale of Bing coming to the rescue is a tad old. Truth is you generate 0.5B in revenues and 2.5B in losses. Look at those numbers again: 0.5 revenue - 2.5 losses AT SCALE (aka: now that the Yahoo traffic goes through you). Every $1 in incremental revenue is costing you $1. You're the laughing stock of the valley and rightly so. Can't wait for the bleeding to stop (2013).
2) "but we're strategic". No you are not. The ad platform is. Search is old news (Facebook anybody) and definitely less strategic to the company than mobile - where we're also getting our ass kicked.
3) "give us 4 more years" - you couldn't turn it around in the last 10, how would the next 4 be different?
4) If you can throw away .... First of all, the fact that an idiotic decision is taken doesn't justify taking more. Second, I see Skype much more likely to pay back (think about it: you simply have to achieve a 10% attach rate of our Office suite to justify the investment in that customer base) than that scam of a business.

We'll miss you guys. As much as a fish misses a bicycle.

Anonymous said...

got my review today - got a 2.

in L64 for 36 months and been exceeded the past 3 years (e/20, e/70).

i am very disappointed for not making 65. i don't know what is needed to get there. i am giving up.

i am looking for a position out there.

- disappointed employee

Anonymous said...

That guy should go to his skip-level manager and angrily demand an explanation for getting a 1.
I bet the manager will agree that giving the guy a 1 wasn't the right thing to do.

Anonymous said...

Windows was once an impenetrable fortress, but in the past year, AAPL has penetrated it with a single product launch.

That's for sure. I went to an interview back in March with a company that had been a total Microsoft shop, top to bottom since they were founded in 1998. SQL Server, IIS, ASP, and they even required their clients to use IE to access their service. This is a business with a market cap around $1.3 billion, and they completely own their market segment.

This christmas, they gave out 200 iPads to their senior management, and a month later, they had decided that all of their services had to be delivered on mobile devices, and the iPad was the only one they cared about. They called me in for a position developing the iPad app for their clients.

iOS cracked the Microsoft monopoly at that company. Once they took a look at iOS, they started re-thinking their server architecture, and they'll probably be moving to Postgres on Linux over the next year and a half. Their employees can choose a Mac or an HP laptop now, and since they made that change, 80% of their people are choosing the Mac.

The long and short of it is, Apple knew they couldn't play the cheap PC game, so they started a new game, and they're winning it, big time.

Anonymous said...

Mr Terry Myerson (the great "reset" guy) even organized an iphone funeral and all in campus after phone 7 shipped [...]"

Yeah, it's too bad that the corpse never turned up.

Anonymous said...

The spectre of corporate implosion looms a little larger each day, and your masters are interested in sweating the peons and milking the cash cows for all they're worth.

Hello, glad to see some of the slashdot crowd in here too. The same guys who've been calling the last nail in Microsoft's coffin for ten years and counting.

And if you'd been paying attention during all that time, you'd have seen that they were correct all along. This is a slow death we're witnessing here - or at least it has been up until now. Drip, drip, drip.

Are you really going to tell us that you think Microsoft can somehow turn it all around?

Anonymous said...

My opinion: if you can throw $8.5 billion down the drain on a whim for Skype, you can sustain Bing for 4 more years

Whatever did happen with Skype? Did Microsoft actually do anything with it?

Anonymous said...

Review today: expected a 1 or 2 since I exceeded all commitments. Got a 5.
Reason: the curve?!
I thought it is not possible to get a 4 or 5 if you exceeded commitments?

Does anyone have advise (other than leave the company) or a similar story for me?

Anonymous said...

Rating 1
L 61, P to 62
Increases in line with expectation and bonus/stock as advertised for 1.

Anonymous said...

They just got a 1.. out of left field. No notice..

Yes - and I would appreciate a 1 with no notice as well...

Trolling for soup again?

Anonymous said...

I get a 4. When should I do now?

Anonymous said...

To all US based ex-softies,

Can try start a "XSoftie Group" on LinkedIn. Former FTE's only. There must be tens of thousands of us. Love to bump into the old Windows lead and GPM in this group or even on the street on the Eastside, what an arrogant, ignorant and worthless/piece-of-sh*t pair. I can expose their names from StenvenSi, JulieLar down to the the lead level on this blog, but will Who da'Punk push my post? Mini, let me know with a reply on this blog, please.

There are opportunities outside of MS. It took me 6 months to have two good offers in hand before choosing and quitting. Have other colleagues who had looked for over a year--while still reporting to work in Redmond---but getting no interviews or offers. It depends on the skill set, experience and our resume.

Since I started with this new company, I have been in three interview loops, the surprising and hard-to-swallow trend is Microsoft experience does not seem to sway the final decision process. Maybe they don't want to say it in at my face, even after I argue for hiring Microsoft guy, the company went to a different candidate. It's just one hire, but the shine is definitely getting dull on the Microsoft "brand" in the job hunting process.

Still have friends who are actively looking to get out, I'm helping where I can, it's getting harder with time---especially for those who spent more than 10 years in Redmond.

Anonymous said...

Triads mean PMs manage PMs and will reward good PM work first and foremost. Devs manage devs and will focus on dev work.

PMs managing PMs is a disaster. The PM org just ends up pissing around and the only way for dev to exert any pressure on them is to escalate to the VP level.

If you're a dev then there's a certain level of accountability that's inherent to the position. It's going to be pretty obvious if you break the build, or if your feature is completely different from the spec, or if it's causing so many bugs that it bogs down the entire team. But if you're a PM, there's basically no accountability. You can play foosball all day and when your spec is due, just bang some gibberish into a spec template. Nobody can prove your spec is bad. If your crap feature needs to be redesigned, just say it's due to user feedback and you sound like a hero. If people STILL don't like your feature, you can blame the dev because your crappy spec is so vague you can always claim that you assumed it would be implemented differently. I've seen this happen a million times. There's no accountability and PMs reporting to PMs just makes the problem worse.

skc said...

Hey, remember when everybody in here was pointing at HP choosing WebOS over WP7 as proof that HP had no faith in Microsoft?

How you like them apples?

Anonymous said...

Reviews are out. Maybe time for a new blog post to compare how the new rating system is screwing even more people than before?

Anonymous said...

"Blogger johnpagenola said...

For Microsoft supporters who think that all of the pro-Apple comments on this blog are from fan boys and shills, you should visit some colleges and universities: the shift by students towards Macs in the last 5 years is stunning. "

This is true. I just went through some post-grad work in Seattle and in some classes where people needed to bring their laptops, the percentage of Apple machines was about 3 to 1. There was actually an MS employee in my class who was using a Mac and she told me that she uses a PC only for work.

I wouldn't take a Mac if they gave me one (wouldn't be able to do my work with it and I like my XP just fine thank you very much); but I was really surprised by Apple's gains with basic users. For the teachers, it's different; Macs are par for the course, they're all lefties and it's part of the image.

Anonymous said...

top 10 or 4-5's (old scale) every year.. They just got a 1.. out of left field.


rofl. Come on. Do a little better on your pretending work. Who is this? Steve Jobs? That cancer must have hit the brain.

Anonymous said...

@Tues, 8/16, 8:08
RE:http://tanishqgoyal.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-sac-out-life-at-microsoft.html

I'm a Microsoft employee, and these are solely my opinions (guess who just took the Standards of Business Conduct training...)

That post is from a 4mo new hire in STC-India (Bing). I don't know if his team is an outlier or not, but it's obvious that his projects are being horribly mismanaged (managers giving four weeks to do two week projects?). And he himself is not motivated enough to do anything beyond coasting through the job.

From what I've seen, that's just not typical behavior for engineers in Redmond/Bellevue. I would be shocked if someone slacking to that absurd level would get above a 4/5 (on the new review scale) if he/she worked on any of the teams I've been on.

Well I guess depending on how prevalent that culture is across the team/division, the fact that this particular dev (allegedly) does finish his deliverables could mean that he would fall in the middle of the curve.

(Aside - the curve/quota is only enforced at a roll-up level, in the dozens or so (?) number of engineers, at least in my org. It'd be ridiculous to force small teams to fit the distribution. And it's mostly a matter of bonus/stock budget - if everybody got a 1 or 2, then how does the money get split?)

The fact that he's a new hire though, really makes me question what kind of work he's being assigned... You're also not really supposed to be taking that much vacation in your first six months.

Maybe that entire post is a troll? I haven't worked with too many teams in India, though I can believe it's not pure exaggeration (personal observation from some of the work I've seen come out of there).

I AM a bit jealous of the free snacks though.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like your objection isn't to Steven's organizational structure, but rather to the realities of a working on a project at the scale and quality bar of Windows.
...
It also means each discipline pushes on the other to keep things centered, in evenly matched triads (which aren't all of them, but on average should be,


Employees are using 'scale and quality' as an excuse for bloat and lack of agility- it's true to a degree but it's added orders of magnitude more process than necessary. Look at the size of Apple vs Microsoft. Don't let the size of Windows let you off the hook- the process is slow and inefficient, fix it. I shipped the feature above to over a hundred million people in very short order- not quite Windows scale but much more impact than anything I could get done at Microsoft.

You should not need a committee to have the right balance between features and quality. The PM/dev/test roles are too technical overall to produce balanced decisions. Drop PMs for UX designers, ditch test managers and bring more sales & marketing into the discussion at the feature level.

Anonymous said...

http://tanishqgoyal.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-sac-out-life-at-microsoft.html

I am surprised that this dude didnt get fired for posting the truth with his name on a blog. I work as a dev in redmond and can verify the same. The microsoft today is about status quo, committees and mediocrity.

Windows 8 takes four years to do six months of coding in soviet style bureaucracy while apple has released version after version of their stuff. Bing is losing billions. Windows Phone is dead on arrival. Azure died before arrival.

'Come to the office any time you want, check your mails, have lunch, play something, do (or pretend to do) some work, go for snacks, gossip a lott, play something, go for a walk occasionally, do some work or forget it and come home. This pretty much describes my schedule for the past four months here.'

This describes my day if you add stupid meetings called by PM to justify their existence.

I am working on an evening MBA program and find it more demanding than my six figure job.

Anonymous said...

Uh, you or your friend have not been paying attention. 1 = good; 5 = bad.

Anonymous said...

"To all US based ex-softies,

It’s time to form an association of us all who can share thoughts and take some good advice from each other.....there has been a lot of blood letting in the past few years and much of it was not necessary.

Can someone take the lead to form such a group, I would strongly request someone to take the lead?"


There are a few ex-MSFT groups around already.

I don't understand why you need a support group for ex-Microsoft employees... what purpose would this solve? Microsoft isn't different than any other giant company with a toxic political culture.

Instead of creating an association of ex-Microsofties who will all just sit around and bitch about Microsoft, why not create an association of displaced tech workers with a specific agenda to network? Much more effective.

And why don't YOU take the lead if you're so hot for it? Don't be a passive pussy. Take action for the things you want.

Anonymous said...

"Can someone clarify whether one needs to stay till the review with manager is complete and signed off before you get the bonus ?"

No you don't have to stay. Last year, I resigned as soon as I knew that stacking is completed. The criteria for bonus is you should be there till June 30th. And I got the bonus in end of September.

Anonymous said...

mini - you are asleep at the wheel. HP selling their PC business is a huge seismic shift in the industry and a telling comment on Microsoft's prospects writ large.

Anon said...

In this last year at Microsoft, it has become painfully clear to me that the giant machine is just too strongly geared toward rewarding and promoting mediocrity. There is little incentive to do one's best and innovate as the rewards just never seem to come close to matching the efforts and results.

I have a feeling the very innovative and most talented people who have the means are likely to be leaving the company in droves either bound for new companies or their own startups. Why work to death at MS making a mediocre salary when you can work to death at your own startup with the stronger potential of making several million within a few years?

More and more I feel like staying at Microsoft is detrimental to my self-development.

Anonymous said...

http://tanishqgoyal.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-sac-out-life-at-microsoft.html

mini is right that the company has too many people. i wont be surprised while this guy celebrates lack of work his managers are busy talking about shortage of resources on their team.

Anonymous said...

Reviewed this week. L63. Several years of E20s in a row. Got a 2 this time around. Total comp for the year (base, bonus, stock) ends up being less than last year, even accounting for moving some stock to base, despite a promo last year AND delivering at much higher level than last. Mini was right - this system sucks.

Anonymous said...

Responding to the person who posted this
"
Reviewed this week. L63. Several years of E20s in a row. Got a 2 this time around. Total comp for the year (base, bonus, stock) ends up being less than last year, even accounting for moving some stock to base, despite a promo last year AND delivering at much higher level than last. Mini was right - this system sucks.


With that attitude, you are lucky you even got a 2. When you move from 62 to 63, it is a whole new ball game. You are in a big pond with the big fish and competing with big boys. You are expected to have technical leadership on entire skip level team, you can’t just do your job and go home. Even l62s need to have such skills at a very high level to be even be considered for promo in some competitive groups.
Your assumption that just because you got an e20 in 62 means you should get also get 1 in 63 is BS. Maybe you are not even ready for the senior band and need a demotion back to 62…

Unless you are in one of those non flattened orgs with an org chart so deep that it has five Gms or you are not in dev org but rather in Pm/test/sales/marketing or someting stupid, in which case who cares about you, everyone is a Senior or Principal in such blaoted orgs and it is pointless to work in such a group for any self respecting engineer…

Anonymous said...


If you're a dev then there's a certain level of accountability that's inherent to the position. It's going to be pretty obvious if you break the build, or if your feature is completely different from the spec, or if it's causing so many bugs that it bogs down the entire team. But if you're a PM, there's basically no accountability.


Could not have said it better, a good analogy is that the PM Job is like a weatherman while dev job is like a fighter pilot. You could be just right 1 out of 10 times if you are a PM and no one cares. You could reset your own decision and direction every few weeks and actually get credit for that by your Pm peers. But with a dev, every small mistake is magnified ten fold. You not only have to do kick ass job but also convince other devs that your job is good, which is very hard…

Anonymous said...

Re:wp7...the only people who love must only use exchange and zune music. My hd7 collects dust. All it does well is display the text "loading...please wait..." for every freaking app you launch... Its a joke.

My android phone crushes it in terms of actual functinality. But hey if you like sliding blue squares around alot thne get one...

Anonymous said...

Anon 12:38 - so much judgment in your rant that I don't even know where to start.

First, I'm in a business role that actually attempts to turn the steaming pile of $hit that the engineering org cranks out into a revenue-generating product.

Second, at no point in my post did I say I deserved a 1. I don't care what the number is - it's just a means to an end. And the end is my total comp. Which happened to be substantially lower than as a 62 when I had much less measurable impact to the business. Which tells me that the review system is a blunt tool that doesn't work well. That is all.

Anonymous said...

"Windows 8 takes four years to do six months of coding in soviet style bureaucracy while apple has released version after version of their stuff. Bing is losing billions. Windows Phone is dead on arrival. Azure died before arrival."

A common pattern in the above is that msft is trying to copy success, but sucking at execution.

W8 is copying ipad but stevesi takes 4-5x the time and effort and his bureaucracy works when you have a monopoly to protect but not against good competition. Even if w8 is comes out better than ipad, w9 will come when the category has been redefined and profits harvested by apple.

No one can beat Google in search, period. For the first time, msft seems to get how to do online services in Bing, but its the wrong battle to fight. The energy there should be spent elsewhere, otherwise it will be like a slow death like yahoo.

Windows Phone has two strong incumbents to take on and team is full of hubris. They seem to hate getting feedback and then get surprised when people dont buy their half baked product. how many of these issues here would have been found if the team listened http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=836373. It would be good that if they learn from HP and cut the bleeding like HP with webOS.

Azure is trying to copy AWS but the costs are going to be a big prohibitor against lean and mean amazon. msft is not designed for the margins that aws operates under and the value added stuff is just not there to deserve a premium.

The good thing here is that if msft goes back to its roots in engineering and shakes the laziness that comes with the big profits, all the businesses are still new and up for grabs. The bad thing is that this means cultural shift which is hard to achieve as the people in power are all used to the old ways and comfortable with that.

Anonymous said...

8.22
12:15p
Despite the positive changes that occurred when Bill Gates left Microsoft, they are used to promote wasteful software/computer purchases with their intentional incompetent operating system.
Protecting the data and the computer in the tretcherous world around a computer is the job of an operating system ,and despite Apple understanding this and generally getting it right Microsoft is corrupt and, much like the relationship between the automobile and petroleum industries in the 20th century and beyond Microsoft has a similar relationship with PC manufacturers to sell units in an environment which is not conducive to repetitive purchases. This is achieved through degradative performance justified with "viruses" and "spryware".
You are welcome, preditor motherfucker antients.
If...

Anonymous said...

Review today: expected a 1 or 2 since I exceeded all commitments. Got a 5.
Reason: the curve?!
I thought it is not possible to get a 4 or 5 if you exceeded commitments?


Welcome to the new review system, where the curve doesn't sharply peak around the middle as it used to (nearly everyone got 3's or 3.5's) but now must conform to a relatively low bell curve. Since 30% have to get 4's and 5's, of course many of those will have exceeded their commitments. In fact, if you're on a V1 team, the vast majority of people will have been killing themselves for a year or more trying to ship, and 30% of them will get hosed. (Ok, probably a few percentage points were somehow slacking in the midst of the tornado and deserved it - but 30%? No freaking way.)

Now what? If you stay, how does this affect your motivation to do squat for the next year? I'm guessing negatively. Maybe that's the point of performance reviews for half the folks now?

BTW, word is that HR has been directed to rewrite the description of what 4's and 5's mean since so many people who've exceeded their commitments are getting slapped with them. Yep, that'll make everyone feel better. "You got a D! That's actually *good*!"

The 10% era was bad enough but things just took a big flying leap downhill for a big chunk of the company.

Anonymous said...

Got a 5 without any warning or hint. No sign of bad performance in MYR, no negative word about performance in weekly 1:1s. In fact even in review manager said I did a 'good job'?? HR says I'm no case of "Performance Management"?

Beware, apparently now it's possible to get a 5 without warning! And what's worse: you can't even find out what to improve!

Love to hear from others what their experience is with this.

Anonymous said...

I would give SB a 4.5, LB a 5.
It doesn't really matter, thay "own" the company. Get it?
You are slaves.

Anonymous said...

"Beware, apparently now it's possible to get a 5 without warning! And what's worse: you can't even find out what to improve!"

My sampathy. Maybe Microsoft should fire the entire HR division and replace it with a random(1, 5). At least everyone will feel being treated fairly!

Anonymous said...

Uh, you or your friend have not been paying attention. 1 = good; 5 = bad.

True for the moment but just wait until Lisa Brummel gets back from her, uhh, vacation and starts working on her review goals for next year. Hey, she's gotta do something to justify that comp package...

Anonymous said...

Mr Terry Myerson (the great "reset" guy) even organized an iphone funeral and all in campus after phone 7 shipped [...]"

Yeah, it's too bad that the corpse never turned up.


Oh the corpse turned up. Just not the one that Terry expected.

Anonymous said...

Alright, it's September 7th. Don't see those layoffs materializing. Anyone? Buehler?

Anonymous said...

Who is up for a class action suit? They forced people into a ranking? How is that legal? If you earn your rating you should get what you deserve.

http://www.garylawgroup.com/law/practices/classaction.html is a good start.

This BS has to stop.

Anonymous said...

As people from India pile in to take most of the IT jobs here in the US, time to look abroad, with a global view, Europe, China, or even Russia. Why not, you need no boundaries when it comes to job hunting. Just hope the Indians won't follow you. :)

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