Microsoft confessions poor worker bees#0…
A capable contributor on my former team, whose name I know, experienced the indignity of a second-level manager suggesting that they go out on disability if they couldn’t handle the stress of the workload, as the manager insisted they should be able to get that workload done in a 40-hour week. Given my background as the longest-term member of the team, including management, I’d call the assertion that that was a 40-hour load shamefully ludicrous to the point of professional negligence.Anyone in the industry knows about crunch times right before ship.
But this was three years of crunch times. After a year had elapsed, the “we don’t have the luxury of time to train additional staff to help us get this done” justification for it started to smell kind of bad. Few teams are like this, but it only takes ending up on one to end your career as a blue badge.
It’s good for people who are considering Microsoft employment to know. It’s also good for people who are considering ex-Microsoft employees for roles in other organizations to know, because among those cut loose are some smart, dedicated, hard workers who were simply asked to do too much, for too long to be able to succeed at it forever in the eyes of the organization and who’d be an asset to just about any company in the industry. I know that if I ever, in the future, receive a rsum from someone who left Microsoft during one of the layoff timeframes in 2009, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
I’m still collecting stories. Please e-mail joewilcox at live dot com.
Stories can be anonymous, but I will need to verify identities.