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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.'"
It may be for nerds, and it may at some level matter, but it's not news.
Whats the difference between a sweeper who is working very hard expecting a bonus at the year end and a programmer who does the same ? Whats is required is a difference in thinking. Never work expecting something. Work honestly and sincerely and do your best. In the end if u dont get the recognition u expected, move on... The important thing is being your own boss. Think of the value you are generating... If the company doesnt recognise it, maybe its time to realign yourself with the corporate goals, do some soul searching too. In the end, maybe it just maybe the time to move on...or better still start something on your own.
I have a big problem with salaries in the U.S. -- employees believe they have a right to a raise every year, even if they are not providing more service or helping the company with added efficiency.
The big problem in the States is the government's crazy dollar creation (what we call inflation is directly caused by the Fed's out of control printing of dollars). This inflation creates cost of living increases (including the housing bubble in my opinion). Because of this inflationary cycle, people demand cost of living increases.
For my businesses, I pay my employees the lowest salary possible, in some cases minimum wage. I myself only earn minimum wage. Yet my employees also get a much larger share of profits, up to 70% on a given project. They are directly tied to the performance of their work, as well as the performance of the market. I'm one of the lowest paid in my IT business (although I also do less work than most).
To get raises, your company has to be making more money in terms of net profits. Microsoft is a company that has to constantly find new ways to profit in order to grow. With the added competition in the marketplace, it surprises me that slashdot geeks constantly berate Microsoft for being a monopoly when they have one of the most volatile markets to sell to -- they're constantly having to find ways to keep customers happy.
I wouldn't work for (or invest in) Microsoft or any large tech company. The red tape and bureaucracy is enormous, and the management system is bound to fail at multiple places when their market turns.
If you are an employee of a company that isn't getting a raise this year, consider the realities of your market:
1. Is your company growing?
2. Is the growth reflected in real profits?
3. Does your company see a volatile near-future that they need to save for?
4. Are you personally more efficient or creating more income for your company?
5. Is your government printing more currency than the economy needs, causing inflation in consumer and housing prices? Does this inflationary cycle hurt your employer?
6. Is your employer's tax burden increasing even if they're paying you the same? Is this increased tax burden causing you to earn less?
When you're an employee, you put off the reward of a very high salary by hedging against the risk of running a business. Some people believe a business' only goal is to generate profits for the owners, but this in totally untrue. A business operates to generate profits in the long run, not the short run. The only way to profit in the long run is to make your customers happy and return for more. Also, the only way to profit is for your employees to be operating more efficiently (more work or less cost) than your competitors. Profitable years might be needed to cover unprofitable years, so you can not focus on only one year or 5 years -- you have to look at the overall picture. When you take a salaried job, you give up having to worry about these things in exchange for job security.
Sometimes you won't get raises, but the world will get more expensive around you. You can almost always blame across-the-board cost of living increases on the guys printing the money. Across-the-board prices don't go up unless the money supply goes up. Don't blame your boss for not being able to compensate for these mistakes made by the central banks.
I don't even have a job you insensitive clod!
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I love working at Microsoft but cannot stay in an environment where I am treated shabbily and afforded no opportunity to defend myself against such treatment."
So are we to deduce that this person at one point loved working in an environment where they were treated shabbily and could not defend themselves? Or they did not know this was the culture at Microsoft and later found out the hard way?
The whole quote about favouritism in reviews (unfortunately) rings true about many companies, not just Microsoft. My advice is if you are unhappy - leave, no one is forcing them to work for Microsoft. And it might just be the best move of your life.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
For all the talk about the economy picking up, jobs being plentiful and it being an employee's market, I have to say the raises for the past few years have been dismal at best. A raise of about 3% has been pretty much standard this year, which doesn't even keep up with inflation, let alone the rising cost of keeping your home (presuming you've bought one in this crazy market).
The value of my home just went up by $146,000 this year alone -- and before you start accusing me of being too greedy, know that I'm not interested in selling, just living here. All that extra value is pure fluff, the stuff that dot-com stocks were made of. The problem is, I'm being forced to pay property taxes that are going up at the rate of 25% a year just to keep my house. Fat chance trying to find a job where my income increases commensurately.
I've no idea what to do, and I'm seriously considering moving to India, and joining the growing contingent of foreign workers there.
Somebody explain to my why it seems that despite the dollar figure of my salary that's far above what my parents earned at my age, I still feel poorer.... and I'm a good saver!
I have a big problem with people like you who have that attitude. Have you heard of a cost of living increase? I have been working for three years without even one of those. In essence, although my value to my company has increased, they are lowering my salary.
For my businesses, I pay my employees the lowest salary possible, in some cases minimum wage. I myself only earn minimum wage. Yet my employees also get a much larger share of profits, up to 70% on a given project. They are directly tied to the performance of their work, as well as the performance of the market. I'm one of the lowest paid in my IT business (although I also do less work than most).
That may be great during good times, but what happens if your business falls on hard times? If you aren't compensating your employees appropriately, do you think they are going to stay? You see, salary is a form of compensation. If you don't pay your employees anything but or near minimum wage, you must not think very highly of your work. Just because an effort fails, does not mean that it was for lack of trying. Profit sharing should be an extra incentive to work even harder.
Its all very simple: if you are paid below your worth, look for an employer that will pay what you are worth. If you can't find one then adjust your concept of what you are worth.
There. One could even make a flowchart of that.
To be honest, I don't see a lot of reason for discontent over 'stagnant' pay comming from rank and file workers at Microsoft. I haven't noticed any major fluctuations within IT job market as a whole when it comes to pay rates in the last two years. And the whole situation becomes even less surprising if one takes into account these two factors:
Company size. Microsoft is not a small business, nor medium, nor even a large one. It's humongous. Thus, it is not really practical to talk about giving raises to i.e. top 5% or 10% performance employees like so many other companies do. In fact, even giving raises to just top 1% of employees still would bump the salary budget significantly every year.
Benefits. From what Net has been saying for years now, Microsoft's benefits and policies really don't suck. From stock options to silly things like 'nap time' during work hours, being a med-level employee for Microsoft doesn't seem to be really all that bad. Just as you check 401K and other benefits when considering work for Sun, IBM or any other IT (or non-IT) company, so too you should consider Microsoft's benefits before you complain about your stagnant pay.
Regarding elements of the article I find interesting: According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers "fight" for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale. - this is definitely nothing unusual. In fact, if my manager didn't fight tooth and nail to prove that me and my team are better than other teams and get us raises or bonuses, seriously, I wouldn't have too high an opinion of him. Likewise, I have to notice that article focuses on salary itself - there is nothing in it about bonuses and incentives that I could find. Having a spouse who works for a major IT industry, I have to say I'm regularly stunned by the sums on her 'chrismas checks', 'yearly performance bonuses' and other 'small' things like that - they certainly make a significant portion of her yearly income (and regularly mess up our taxes, too).
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
"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".
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.
I strongly advise getting a passport and going to see how the rest of the world lives if you think 2-3% inflation is out of control.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Or, in the words of Bill Clinton circa 1992: "It's the economy stupid!"
My earnings have been flat since 2000, and significantly lower than what I made in 1997-8. The same (mostly) can be said for my staff. If I could pay them more, I would in a heartbeat, but we haven't been able to raise prices in 6 years, so revenues have grown, right along with costs which means profits remain... dismal. If I gathered up all the profit our company has made in the past 6 years, I MIGHT be able to purchase a small Korean sedan. Instead I've done what any smart employer can do, which is give rasies where I can (which means NOT to me sadly) and plowed the rest of it back into the company. We should all be earning 40% more than we are, but we're not. Deal with it.
I have a big problem with salaries in the U.S. -- employees believe they have a right to a raise every year, even if they are not providing more service or helping the company with added efficiency.
Typically, technical employees DO provide more service every year, based on constantly learning how to do what they do better, as well as commonly picking up other skills from surrounding employees. In addition to this, many times, when an employee quits, it is up to the existing employees to pick up the slack, because the company won't hire a replacement, or hires an entry level replacement which can only pick up a small amount of the work that was done by the outgoing person.
In addition, every year, the cost of living goes up. Many companies consider a Cost of Living Adjustment a raise, but it is absolutely not. It just allows you to maintain the same style of living you had last year. If you do not receive even a Cost of Living Adjustment, your style of living must diminish, and your company is saying to you that you are worth less to them this year than you were last year.
You mention several things that may be affecting the companies ability to pay raises. Well, that's life. We justify high CEO salaries by saying that they take all the risk in running the business. But in reality this is purest BS. The employees take all the risk because they will be fired, not the CEO. They will not receive raises if money is short. Even if the CEO gets canned, he will get a glorious severance package. Plus, the fact that he was a spectacular failure as a CEO is worth more on a resume than if hw was a spectacular success as a programmer.
You also mention that businesses have to look long term, over 5 years or more. In publically held companies, I observe that the "public" will not allow them to look more than one quarter in the future. Investors will not allow them to spend more money on research or developing new products. Everything is quarter to quarter financials until the old products you have become obsolete and your business fails.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
...it has to be with all the chairs soaring through the hallways.
The big problem in the States is the government's crazy dollar creation (what we call inflation is directly caused by the Fed's out of control printing of dollars). This inflation creates cost of living increases (including the housing bubble in my opinion). Because of this inflationary cycle, people demand cost of living increases.
I agree that the reasoning behind cost of living increases is somewhat circular. But this tail wagging the dog notion of inflation applied during the 1970's when US government fiscal policy was inflationary. That is no longer the case. We have plenty of other problems instead. The housing bubble was encouraged by persistent, historically low interest rates. It enlarged the number of buyers. It allowed people to buy up in value. Those same people continue to flip properties in the virtuous (I say vicious) cycle. Low interest rates are due to the insatiable appetite of export economies (like China and Japan) for US treasuries and other investments. They make enormous profits, they don't consume, so they have nowhere to put their money. You can't 'invest' in over capacity forever. They also have their own real estate speculation problems. At the moment we in the US are partying on their cheap money. Enjoy it while it lasts.
an ill wind that blows no good
Companies that are owned by stock holders are only interested in profits, and then only as a way to boost stock share prices enough for them to sell for a gain. That means companies with stock holders do stupid things like fire 30% of their staff to make a profit or create short term gains at the cost of long term growth, thus threatening everyone's jobs.
I'd suggest anyone working for such a company to quit.
The company has no long term investment in you and would fire you in a minute if it meant their bottom line would increase their stock values. Half the time they aren't even looking to be more profitable... they just want to increase stock prices. The trend of not paying dividends has left public held companies in bad standing.
What you should be looking for is a small company that will value you and where replacing you would be painful and where making you a better and empowered worker wont threaten the employer with ideas that you'll run away with your new found skills.
Or better yet, start your own company. If you are working for a company (if a company pays you) you're obviously worth twice that. They can't make a profit on you if you aren't.
Bill Gates obviously thinks 64k should be enough for anybody.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This inflation creates cost of living increases (including the housing bubble in my opinion). Because of this inflationary cycle, people demand cost of living increases.
The housing bubble was created by a complete lack of confidence in the stock market. The investors then put more money into land, tying up a greater percentage of it and causing the prices to go up. If they sell land to put the money back in the stock market, the market will jump 10% in a month, and the price of land will drop 10-30%. Hopefully they won't all go at once and make the big popping sound.
But, back to the topic at hand, if you recognize inflation as something that happens, and something that won't go away, I can't see how you complain about raises as a matter of course. The employee costs you the same this year as last if you give them the 2% raise. You say they should get the same, unless they distinguish themselves, so you should be giving them a raise by what you said. However, it seems that you hate the government and take it out on your employees. Like you are trying to convert them to gold-standard nuts or something by blaming their lower wagers each year on the government. But, since it is a factor you are aware of and can correct for, your conscious decision to lower their buying power is the act that hurts them, not inflation.
Learn to love Alaska
You will not advance over the 50% mark of your company's pay scale. Since the 1990s, personnel and payroll departments in companies have instituted a graduated pay structure often called "Banding" or "Leveled Pay" to save costs. The concept behind these systems is to organize employees into similar grades depending upon job category and responsibility. A secretary and a construction worker may be placed into the same grade, while their managers and engineers would be placed at a higher grade. These grades span a set amount of money, so for example the construction worker may earn anywhere between $30,000 and $50,000 per year.
However, this system was also structured to keep dangling a carrot in front of the eyes of the employee. The midpoint in these systems is designated as the "market average". Therefore, if you are near this midpoint, you are considered "paid competitively" compared to the rest of the people in that niche market. This makes the possibility for future raises smaller or nonexistent. For the sample construction worker, this would mean that he would not advance above $40,000 per year. While you may believe that you have the possibility of getting up to the top point in the grade, the system is intentionally designed to retard compensation.
I welcome any thoughts if this could be stated better.
--Chag
Just like many others have said, I don't see this as news. Microsoft is just like every other big company? Surprise.
The problem with US companies - perhaps all companies - is that culture is completely upside down. People who run and own companies (executives and shareholders) are interested in more profits today. Or at least this quarter. Short-term, in any event.
In order to get those short term gains, the company cuts every cost possible. Considering that payroll and benefits is usually the biggest expense to a company, employees (the people doing the work that generates the profit) get to take home only as much as will keep them coming to work tomorrow.
A longer term view would be of benefit to everyone, including the people at the top who are interested in profits. The first aim of management should be to keep its employees very happy. Those employees will, in turn, keep customers happy. The customers will continue to purchase what you're selling, and will tell their colleagues about how great you are.
End result? Employees are happy and well-compensated. (Side note: I know that I would be more productive at work if I didn't have to worry about making ends meet at home.) Customers are satisfied and deliver profits with their own purchases and referrals. Management gets big bonuses. Shareholders get a higher value for their stock.
If your goal is to increase profits, the fallout is having to clean up after a short term gain. If your goal is to increase share value, the fallout is to clean up after shareholders take their short term gains. If your goal is to take good care of your employees, the long term benefits are substantial. This is how Japan took over the US auto industry; with five and ten year plans.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy for executives in the US to jump from one company to another, squeezing the life out of each until it's time to jump again.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
So in other words, this is MS SARS. Am I wrong in thinking that they claim that Windows Defender can cure it, or at least inoculate against it?
Money for nothing, pix for free
Actually, you Americans have such a low inflation rate despite the amount of paper money printed by your central bank because most of this paper ends up in the dollar reserves of foreign central banks. This happens because all those foreign central banks believe that having tons of dollar bills stored equals their countries being "rich" (much in the same way as the XVII century merchantilists believed that having tons of gold stored away meant their countries were "rich"). Since all these bills aren't running around in the real American economy, they don't make prices go up.
If (or when) those central banks decide spending those dollars by sending them back to the USA, the violent increase in the amount of bills in the economy will make the inflationary American bubble crash hard. Good prices will double, triple, or even more.
And why? Simple: because if you had 'x' tons of goods and 'y' tons of bills, thus 'y' being able to buy 'x', now you'll have the same 'x' tons of goods, but '3y' tons of bills, meaning '3y' = 'x'.
Now, guess which country is planning to do exactly that? If you guessed "China", you guessed right. They see themselves as enemies of the USA, and they see all the dollar bills they accumulated as just another weapon among many.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
If you read through the whole article to the end, they give a counter example of Boeing being more fair because of unions. Up until that point, I thought it was an article without an axe to grind. That thing was just a puff piece to show the "goodness of being unionized". Right there, I wrote off the whole article, since the writer has an agenda. It should have been an editorial, since that's what those are supposedly for.
The big problem with unionizing is that what happened to the other industries will happen to high tech.... I'm not talking about layoffs, strikes, or anything like that. I'm talking about people that don't do their job.
It'll be a WHOLE lot harder to get someone fired for goofing around. For those of you in the automotive industry, you know what I'm talking about. Down on the floor, you look at someone the wrong way, they file a report. You catch someone not doing their job, no hope firing them on the spot, because the union steps in, and that's it. It's become part of the culture there. Not everyone is that way, of course, but the slackers are taking advantage of the system.
Can you imagine if that happened in high tech? I mean, we all work with some goofballs, but at least there's a chance they'll get canned, or move on after low performance reviews.
With a union, there would be almost no hope for that.
Another thing is that while you would probably get a raise every year, there's much much less of a chance that working really hard on a great new idea for the company will land you that promotion, big raise and big bonus. Nope....You're unionized now fella. Gotta do what's good for the union. No promotion, big raise or big bonus for you! The union's taken care of everything. You get the same as everyone else in your grade scale. It's like the old Dilbert comic "I get paid the same, no matter what I do".
If there's one sure why to drive the industry into the ground, that'd be it.
For the record... I hate you.
One employee in the company's Mobile and Embedded Devices group said when it comes to her review score, "my performance is about 10 percent of the whole equation."
This sounds like what someone that got a bad review would say.
No Sigs!
step 2: bank lends money at higher interest to govt at a higher interest rate in the form of bonds
step 2.5: gov't prints money to pay their debt
There fixed that for you
Joel Spolsky, who has a nice blog called "Joel on Software",
wrote a very thought provoking article back in 2000. It is
called "Incentive Pay Considered Harmful".
He discusses how *not* to manage smart, highly educated employees.
Since Joel is a programmer who used to work at MS, his case comes directly
from Redmond.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
The word "bias", in use by rightists
FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE RIGHT WING CONSPIRICY
How did we let this guy through? I thought the laser-pengiuns that Haliburton made were going to do their JOBS this time.
Instead, this Chomskyit is allowed to speek. WE NEED THOSE LASER-PENGIUNS UP AND RUNNING!
Let's move to PLAN XB21 - ACTIVATE GORILLA MAYHAM!
(signing off) - Illuminati #40202
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Whats is required is a difference in thinking. Never work expecting something. Work honestly and sincerely and do your best. In the end if u dont get the recognition u expected, move on... The important thing is being your own boss.
Agreed, and this is what I *hated* about the review process. I spent a lot of time generating immense value for Microsoft. I helped bring success in a number of venues and yet any time I attempted to bring these up in review, I was *criticized* for helping out other divisions of the company. Something about me being an employee of my team rather than the company as a whole. My review scores were always 3.5.
I hated reviews. It was a process I generally barely tolerated because it turned the managers into backstabbing weasels. Interdepartmental politics always trumped the significant value of my contributions at a time when I was helping to write the strategy of competing against Linux (as a Level 54, no less). My managers would encourage me until review time and then cut me down in the review over it.
I personally will not consider going back to work at Microsoft. Even though I left largely due to personal issues that left me no choice but to quit, I would not willingly go back.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The way this works at big companies is pretty simple.
Everybody is evaluated; the evaluation is political, it's painful, and managers don't want to do it, so the results are less than perfect. You should worry if you end up near the bottom, but that's all.
But, in the end, it doesn't matter that much: when times are good, those curves move up and everybody gets a raise.
When times are not so good, nobody gets a raise, except for people who manage to negotiate one. That's the situation Microsoft is in, because although they are still looking good financially, they know they're in trouble.
How do you negotiate a raise? You get a better offer from somewhere else and negotiate. If your company wants to keep you, they'll make a counteroffer. If you made yourself a nuisance or if they think you're not that useful, they'll wish you good luck in your new job.