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Internal Microsoft Poll Shows Employees Are Less Satisfied With Pay (cnbc.com)
According to an annual companywide survey, obtained by CNBC, Microsoft employees said they're less fairly paid in 2018 than they were in any of the past three years. When asked if "total compensation (base pay, bonus, equity) is competitive compared to similar jobs at other companies," only 61 percent said it was, down from 65 percent in 2017 and 67 percent each of the two prior years. From the report: Additionally, just 62 percent of the employees agreed that "people are rewarded according to their job performance," down from 63 percent last year and 64 percent in 2016. Those two questions received some of the lowest scores on the survey. The company said that 86 percent of Microsoft's employees participated. The results, shared by Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan in April, are a further indication of the challenge that Microsoft and other tech companies face in hiring and retaining top talent. Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, is just a few miles from Amazon's home and isn't far from the Seattle offices of Google, Facebook and a growing number of start-ups. Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan said the company takes the issue "seriously," and that it will work to ensure a more balanced pay structure.
Why is this even news?
Because it is about salaries at a tech company. What could be more relevant to Slashdotters, other than maybe the cost of renting a basement?
I am surprised Microsoft is publicizing this. They are hurting recruitment by broadcasting that they have crappy pay, and raising expectations of salary increases among existing employees.
This is what Github employees, now Microsoft employees have to look forward to.
Back in the late 90s, anyone who had a passing familiarity with computers was commanding a huge salary regardless of talent. I'm sure Microsoft is in an arms race with Amazon and Google these days. All three companies are going at a breakneck pace trying to develop new cloud services or make the ones they already run cheaper to run. The race is on to lock as many customers into their cloud provider as they can because no one is buying software licenses anymore.
What's interesting is that with everything moving to the cloud, these 3 companies and a few others will probably be the chief consumers of developer and infrastructure engineering talent. And at least in previous years, Microsoft selected for highly talented people and paid enough to ensure they didn't run off to a competitor. I've worked with people who've been at Microsoft for 20+ years...if you're really talented they do a lot to keep you. I think this is why that survey result is surprising.
We'll see what happens in a couple years. I'm betting a huge chunk of cloud consumption is startups selling bags of dog food and AI-powered, IoT driven, blockchain-enabled subscription boxes online. When that goes away, people are still going to use AWS/Azure/GCP, but I just don't think they'll get the stupid levels of revenue they're getting today from the VC money.
If the pay is junk, it means costs are down. Investors like to hear that, donâ(TM)t they?
About the time I left (~5 years ago) pay was starting to stagnate and become much less competitive. Older more experienced folks were pushed out and the youngins' are happy with the free rides around campus/perks/quality of life stuff with terrible pay. It really is a race to the bottom at that company as no one I know that is REALLY good at their job still works there.
Sometimes those greener pastures are greener because of all the fertilizer, if you get my drift.
If the pay is junk, it means costs are down. Investors like to hear that, donâ(TM)t they?
Any sensible investor would see this as a warning that payroll expenses are likely going up, and profits may decline.
This happens at every big company, and Microsoft also has super-deep pockets so they can afford to have some dead wood. If you're measuring 'time put in" as years with the company, that's true...there are some people in big companies who know the right people and can coast for decades. But you can also measure time put in as how many 100-hour weeks you put in on product deathmarches, how tethered you are to VSTS 24 hours a day, etc. Those people who are workaholics will also be recognized over very productive, smart people because they're more visible. They're the ones leaving work at 1 AM and coming back for more.
As a counter example to MS dead wood, look at HP/HPE. The bottom has dropped out of non-white box servers and storage...if you believe the pundits no one is buying new equipment. Companies also have less of a need for third-rate crappy offshore IT support. As a result, HP/HPE/DXC have been throwing thousands of people overboard. We actually do buy equipment still, and it's a normal occurence to have the person you've been talking with for years suddenly get fired. HP could afford to be bloatted when they were making a healthy margin on servers and selling a ton of them.Azure.
Microsoft doesn't have this problem. They have huge cash reserves and are about to lock every single Windows enterprise into Office 365 and Azure. I wouldn't expect the dead wood to go away anytime soon.
low pay = more H1B's that locked to the job and will do 80+ hours a week so they don't kicked out the USA.
It's kind of weird actually. Back in the British Colonial times, English companies went to India to exploit the workers there.
Now the workers from India come to the US voluntarily to be exploited there.
Lazy American companies! They can't even be bothered to travel abroad to exploit folks!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
For companies in some sectors perhaps, but if you suddenly have a lot of people earning more money, they're going to spend some of it, which means other companies are going to see larger revenues and more profits. The trick is being able to determine where that extra money is going to go.
Also, if you offer the best pay, you can probably attract better employees. If that allows you to deliver superior products to market more quickly than your competition, it could mean that you actually increase revenue and profit even though you spend more money.
The other side of that is that if you aren't paying well enough, you'll probably lose some employees who go elsewhere seeking better pay. The employees that you lose are going to be the ones that have better skills and can convince someone to pay them more, and not the paper shufflers that don't do all that much. If employees roughly follow the 80/20 rule, then losing some of your best 20%, probably means losing significantly more than that in productivity.
I use to joke that Microsoft marketing strategy was to tell customers "stick with us the next version sucks less" and then underdeliver.
I looks like they are applying this marketing strategy to their employees as well. Well, it worked for a few short decades.
In tech, you generally lose the top half of your successful employees if you don't pay as well as other nearby competitors. Microsoft... does not pay as well as other nearby competitors.
The Ballmer years seemed to staunch slower product development with more successful sales, until that stopped working.
Nadella's been really successful at turning things around for their eng teams, and putting some balance back in there, but if they keep bleeding people... that's not good.
I have a friend who works at Microsoft. In the mid 2000s, after Microsoft stock had been stagnant for years, he said that Microsoft was trying to increase their salaries to make up for the fact that the stock was a poor performer. I guess now that their stock has been skyrocketing the last few years, they want more stock instead of a good salary.