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The Microsoft Salary and Review System
f1055man writes "If you can make it through the obvious bias, Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WASHTECH) has put together a revealing article on Microsoft's salary and review system. 'Internal Microsoft documents obtained by WashTech News show that Microsoft salaries have been stagnant or nudged only slightly higher over the past two years. Comments from current and former employees about the company's compensation and performance review system suggest a growing level of frustration among rank-and-file workers.'"
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"Large corporation with enormous bureaucracy has internal politics" Where's the story?
Yeah, I worked for MS for 5 years. Yes the review system runs largely on Politics - those who play the game get the rewards. How is this different from 99% of the rest of corporate America?
MS takes pretty darn good care of it's employees (my salary at MS was anywhere from 150% to 200% of industry standard for my position depending on whose numbers you looked at, and that doesn't even count top notch health benefits). In return, they expect you to buy into the company culture that your job is your only priority. I knew guys who would set up their Outlook to send emails at 2 and 3 in the morning to give the impression they were working late. I had a manager who's only measure of an employee's worth was whether or not they were working at least 10 hours of "overtime". Our Society as a whole tends to reward appearance over substance 9 times our of 10. Why is it a shock when corporations follow suit. If you were willing to spend the time and effort to play the game, you too could get the rewards. Personally, I couldn't stand the Company Culture at MS and that's why I'm not working there anymore and will not be working there for a long, long time (if ever) if I can help it. But just because that culture doesn't jive with my own standards and priorities doesn't make it immoral or illegal.
Now, there's business practices of upper management that are a whole other story as far as immoral and illegal, but I'm not getting into that here.
Heh, reminds me of my favorite joke while I was working there "The day Microsoft sells something that doesn't suck is the day Microsoft starts selling Vacuum Cleaners".
Raises every year went away around 1969 IIRC. The reason employees are clamoring for raises is their cost of living goes up every year. During the last year my property taxes have gone up 22%, health care went up 30%, deductibles doubled, gas went way up. My salary hasnt gone up at all. BTW the reason for inflation is not govt printing more dollars-- that's both irrelevant and inconsequential. You could do your business a favor by reading some basic book on macroeconomics.
They should kidnap people like you and force them to major in Economics at a Real School. Then you might not do so much harm to the world.
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The parent poster did address cost of living increases, but he said that cost of living increases are formed by inflation. Some businesses are unable to keep up with inflation and therefore are unable to raise their workers' salaries. Inflation results in higher cost of living, because the money is worth less than it used to be.
Businesses generally want to pay their employees as least as possible but at fair market value in order to keep the workers happy and productive. They try to keep up with inflation and other market situations (such as cost of living), in order to keep their labor. However, businesses sometimes are unable to keep up (inflation, loss of profits, etc.) and make up for that via no raises (or worse, wage cuts), layoffs, etc.
I don't think MS is anything special here. This bullshit goes on at pretty much every company. You work at a cube farm, you get treated like an animal. Hell, my company sent out a company-wide email last week saying pay raises will be reflected in our next paycheck. There hasn't been one mention of reviews. In fact, reviews are sporadic at my co, apparently. Sometimes January, sometimes March. Eitehr that, or I'm getting fired next week since my boss hasn't mentioned one word about my review.
If you want control of your own pay, start your own gig. Plain and simple. That's what I'm in the middle of doing. I think it's absurd that millions of people bust their asses from 40-60 hours per week only to get a measly 2-4% annual raise. Why put in the effort for an extra $30 or so a week?
*applauds*
Auron may be different, Cally, but on Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
The inflation figure that the government (the BLS) creates is based on BS. Robert Blumen has a great article regarding this manipulation. They swap out numbers at will to hide the fact that they're creating money out of thin air, and depreciating the value of your money. The stock market has only gone up 500% in 90 years in terms of real value because of money printing.
There are a few links to Rothbard's book in this entire thread. It is a free and tiny e-book, I'd highly recommend reading it.
Governments agencies have been doing this for years. But you do move up the scale...just much more slowly. For example, if you are above the mid-point your raises will be smaller and if you are below it the raises will be larger. Why? Because everyone in the grade receives their raise based on the mid-point. So if 3% is the norm everyone receives 3 percent of the mid-point.
For a company like Microsoft to be losing good people due to poor compensation is bad management that borders on negligence. MS is sitting on billions of dollars. Are they doing anything with that money that's more worthwhile than retaining their talent?
No. The problem is more complex than that and boils down to interdepartment politics. The problem is not just that the process needs to be redesigned but that the company as a whole is too big to come up with something better. The upper level management often has *no clue* what goes on by those that actually do the work, and every effort is made to perpetuate this insulating environment.
The real problem, in my opinion, is the role that Middle Management have carved out for themselves. Most problems, including those of the review process, can be traced to them. In many ways they are the reason why the upper management doesn't really know what is going on.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When the fact that I have passed 15 Microsoft certified professional exams does not excuse my attempts to build the company's image rather than exceed the required (for my position) of two per year by double or tripple, then the I have a right to be upset.
My contributions, OTOH (in lieu of overly exceeding on the MCP exam requirement) included championing a number of product modifications (including the POP3 server in Server 2003), getting the team going to Linuxworld to take SFU (they were just going to take Shared Source and Embedded Windows), and sending in recommendations that have (since I left) transformed the Linux competitive strategy.
Which is a better use of my time? I bet that if I studied, I could pass the MCSD VB track exams without writing a single line of code. So should I do this? Or should I have done what I was doing?
Yes, it is stupid. Yes it is the way big corps work. Yes, it is why I would not go back to work there.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP