This morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an internal memo promising more money for his employees, which is likely to see them get less stock and more cash.
In another email to managers yesterday, Ballmer said that Microsoft has been listening to employees for a while and decided that the current review system needed an overhaul. Microsoft has been losing some good talent to other tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, which gave all its employees a $1000 bonus and 10 percent raise last year. Microsoft employees have complained for years about the slow rate of growth in their base pay.
Ballmer said that Microsoft is getting rid of its current review system and moving to a “single performance rating with clear awards.” From his email:
For all employees, we will have merit increase opportunities aligned with local market dynamics and performance rating.
We will make important increases in compensation for specific populations where the market has moved the most — early and mid-level R&D, mid-level company-wide and certain geographies.
For all employees, we will shift a portion of stock award targets into base salary, providing more cash up front and obvious incremental employee value. Senior leaders will continue to have a large portion of their overall compensation in stock to ensure their compensation is heavily tied to the financial performance of the company.
We are increasing funding for our bonus and stock awards so we can deliver 100% or more of target bonus and stock awards to 80% of our eligible employees. This is up from about 50% in prior years.”
“Today morning”? Really?
it’s leet speek.
like geographies …
better than him throwing chairs at you.
the problem @ microsoft is that the culture (& therefore both advancement & decision making) is driven by self-serving assholes. a new review system isn’t going to change that.
Call me when they restore the 10% pay cut they gave to dash trash. Or stop playing stupid accounting games with their payroll costs in the first place. Just hire employees already, MSFT.
@3
I was a temp for MS for 3 years, you have no idea what your talking about. MS treats their employees very well. Some get stock options, some dont. The only jerks I encountered were programers, who often had tall orders to fill by the project managers (stressed and overworked will make anyone a jerk).
@5
i was at microsoft for 7 years. 5 full time & 2 years prior to that as a contractor. the last 3 years i had a clear view into leadership, the decision making process & the promotion process. i was part of several re-orgs, watched multiple groups get destroyed from within as people (read: assholes) manipulated entire organizations for their short term gain (getting gm or director) & succeeded wo/ repercussions despite the fact that they destroyed the products. i have dozens of friends sprinkled throughout the company who all complain about the same things. every technology company in the world should have a satelite office in seattle just to pluck off (often brilliant but) horribly frustrated microsoft engineers who are either uninterested in playing the game described above or are ill-equipped (socially) to do so.
so, to put it succinctly…. it’s YOU who doesn’t know what the fuck you are talking about.
I was at Microsoft for 13 and a half years in some capacity, until last summer. Philosophy School Dropout knows what s/he is talking about. The whole culture is built around competition between alpha geeks. The stack review system with its forced distribution regardless of absolute merit discourages teamwork, encourages favoritism, rewards infighting, and screws anyone who for reasons that can be entirely political gets a single bad review. There’s also competition between teams to develop technologies going after the same market, which wastes resources and discourages cross-team collaboration. They still exploit their contract workforce instead of hiring them outright. Now they’re cutting back on the platinum health plan, which was really the only strong distinguishing benefit they offered. You can get away with that when everyone has stock that’s doubling in value every year, as in the late 90s, because people put up with bullshit for the eventual reward. But without that the pay isn’t so great, the review system is a joke, and much of the management doesn’t have a clue about how to deal with people.
Oh, and engineers and other tech people, like most everyone not in manual labor, get their motivation primarily from intrinsic rewards and not extrinsic ones. So the only effect of poor compensation is to make people feel unwanted, yet the few who are getting extra compensation in the system aren’t particularly motivated either. The way to fix that is to have a cool place to work, where you’re doing important or meaningful work. That was true in the earlier years at Microsoft when their products were new and successful and the company had a vision about where it was going. But when the company can’t execute on anything and is lagging its competitors in almost every growth market (media devices, mobile phones, tablets), and has become a synonym for technological failure, its employees are going to be demoralized. They need to get rid of Steve Ballmer and bring in someone who has both vision and a technical clue. There are lots of smart, capable, and committed people there and a lot of their effort is being wasted.
The basic problem is that their products have been total fecal matter since the mid-1990s. Of course the organization is a disaster, it’s just a big rent-collecting mafia. Seattle is loaded with payroll-patriots who will of course defend the mothership, but it’s a fucking nightmare.
@philosophy school dropout
My apologies. You are correct, I was not working for MS during, what sounds like, some pretty fucked up years.
I had only temped there 3 years, leading up until the XP launch. The enforcement of the perma-temp rule basically ended my work in DX testing. The majority of the employees were great, never had a problem with them. All but one, who was a tester who would skip out and get stoned every day, due to stress related work (ie: someone who was struggling to understand his job).
@kinison
i shouldn’t have been so snarky. my apologies. re: the people at microsoft. that’s the saddest thing. i have so many great friends from ms who are genuinely good people. but the culture there is just a disaster & who/how you have to be to get ahead is unsettling.
Please. I am a *current* Microsoft employee. The place is fucking great. Is it perfect? Hee-eelll naw. But it is a hell of a lot better than just about any other place on the face of this planet. Are there assholes? Hee-eell yeah. Lots of assholes? Heee-eelll yeah. But you know what? When you collect 90,000 people, you are going to have assholes.
The people who bitch about Microsoft, and yes, there are lots of them, are entitled to their perspective. I’m not going to change their minds, and frankly I’m fine with the griping. Because most of the whiners don’t know what it is like. And for all the warts, it is an amazing place to work. And sorry, our products aren’t shit. We kick ass in a lot of areas, just not all of them. But you know what? We’re tenacious as hell, and if we don’t succeed, well goddam, we are going to work our asses off trying.
As an employee, I totally agree with #7!!
this place is full of selfish, self-serving micro bitches who fuck over any woman who threatens them and brownnosing GM’s who live in a wealth bubble and don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves and their trophy wives. They better watch out, cause the revolution is coming, and their heads are the first ones that will be on the chopping block.