6 ms·

Microsoft should probably try a 5 day / 40 hour workweek here in the US some time. From what I was told at a few interviews there, and from friends who work the

Microsoft should probably try a 5 day / 40 hour workweek here in the US some time. From what I was told at a few interviews there, and from friends who work there, 50 hours a week is pretty much normal and expected. Sounds terrible, and I'm not sad to not work there.

vbtemp 6y ago
I heard that they have the best work-life balance of any of the big tech co, in exchange for having the lowest salary/equity. Oh well...
- throwaways885 6y ago
  Isn't Google a better place for WLB? I too have heard bad things about Microsoft.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Google seems to be the gold standard.
filoleg 6y ago
Were your friends working in Azure or were you interviewing in Azure? Asking because Azure is the only place where I've heard about it (and even then, rarely). I have friends all over MSFT (at their main Redmond HQ campus, not remote offices), and no one outside of Azure works over 40/week. The occasional overtimes/crunches happen so infrequently, they could count the number of those days per year on one hand. And even an average workweek frequently falls under 40/week (all engineering btw, cannot comment on other positions like PM or design). I honestly am baffled by your info, because Microsoft definitely has a reputation here for being one of the more "relaxed" tech companies. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons I am staying, because I could definitely make noticeably more by switching to another tech giant, but I don't want to lose my work-life balance, as it isn't easy to find at all.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  My SO is on a team on Microsoft where they are expected to not infrequently work weekends and work until 8 PM. e: Thought this was outside of Azure, but I was wrong
  - filoleg 6y ago
    Sorry to hear that, and I realize that what I said is as much of anecdata as what you said, but this sounds more like an exception. Those exceptions do happen. For example, Amazon is known to be a brutal meatgrinder for engineers, and most of the experiences I've heard of from people I know irl support that assertion. That reputation isn't a secret to absolutely anyone. However, there are definitely those rare few teams at Amazon that are actually quite nice about work-life balance and are extremely functional, without any usual bs you would expect from an average Amazon team. But those teams are absolutely an exception. Is your SO on Xbox by any chance? Not asking it to invalidate what you have said, I am just genuinely curious. Plus, it would be another good datapoint for me to be aware of in the future. I was guessing Xbox because anything gaming-related is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about insane work hours.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Ah okay - actually the team they are on is within Azure, my fault for getting that wrong. Seeing them WFH has been really eye-opening on how bad & micromanaging managers can get.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  I spent 8 years in engineering at MS in the 2000s--it was no worse or better than any other tech company. There was never an explicit expectation to work more than 40 hours, and most managers were good about not pressuring people into disturbing work-life balance. But, at the end of the year you were calibrated against all of your peers and WLB was not a criteria that mattered. If you just put in your 40 hours you probably wouldn't get fired, but you definitely were not going to be promoted when compared to the people cranking out more work per week. There was a big divide with the younger, fresher folks working all the time (and making their work very visible). Once you were a senior dev you kind of had a choice to make--if you wanted to keep a high 'promotional velocity' you had to keep working >40 hour weeks or be left in the dust. If you didn't want to climb that ladder then it was totally fine but you would never be promoted beyond another level or two. I knew folks who were senior devs for 10, 15, or even more years. In contrast the partners/high performers were all regularly getting promotions every 2 years or less and absolutely none of them I knew worked less than 60-80 hours a week. To get promoted up to principal and beyond levels required having a consistent history of promotions every couple years--there was no way to really pause or slow down without stopping your entire career development. From my friends still left there I don't think much has changed over the years. It's a somewhat subtle system where managers and HR can proudly point to never requiring people to work crunch time. They can trot out plenty of 10 year senior engineers to give quotes and talk about how it's so great to just work 40 hour weeks. But at the end of the day if you want to be successful and rise up the ranks at MS, you are going to be working all the time, period (at least until you reach partner level).
snakeboy 6y ago
Is 50 hours that crazy? Does anyone else feel like these days they put in well above 40 hours a week doing WFH? Granted, during the day I can't stay 100% focused in my apartment, so I waste maybe an hour throughout the day online. Then I feel guilty and stay online well into the evening/weekends. I can't meet my deadlines otherwise.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Over the long haul? yeah it is. Some people absolutely adore their work, so 50 or even 60 hours is nothing. The majority of us though 40 hours is plenty.
- mikestew 6y ago
  Is 50 hours that crazy? I dunno, an extra 25% over what is normally expected? What exactly is your threshold for a ticket on the Crazy Train?
- DocTomoe 6y ago
  In large parts of the western world, 50 hours is actively illegal and opens the company up for legal trouble with the state.
- haswell 6y ago
  50 hours can mean the difference between: - Getting a healthy amount of sleep or not - Having time to eat a proper breakfast or not - Having time to prepare dinner (vs. order out) - Getting that evening bike ride in before dark or not - And on and on I can't help but feel your response to this is part of the problem. 50 hours is a lot of hours, and we shouldn't normalize it. This was less clear to me earlier in my career. I held a similar viewpoint for awhile. As time went on, and I saw the long term impact on those around me, and eventually myself, I shifted my viewpoint greatly.
  - Arrath 6y ago
    >I can't help but feel your response to this is part of the problem. 50 hours is a lot of hours, and we shouldn't normalize it. While I absolutely agree with you, my career first as a union laborer and now a construction field engineer have really jaded me to the count of hours. It can be very different across different industries. On my current project Engineers are expected to be present to support field operations, which means starting before the craft workers to ensure everything is ready for the day (possibly as early as 0500) while still being here until 1700 like any other 'office job'; its pretty outrageous. At least when I was a laborer I was hourly. What can be done to fight the normalization of this? For myself, I fought my way to a senior engineer position and lobbied for a larger staff. Now I not only have enough people to do the job, but we stagger our shifts out to each get around 8hr/day while ensuring full coverage for our field guys throughout their shift. I've worked to instill a culture of "hey you've been here long enough, go the fuck home" with my team. But it took too long to get to this point, and much more tooth and nail fighting than it should have to convince higher ups of the need for what they saw as 'excess staffing', even for my department which is very much production critical.
paxys 6y ago
I have worked at Microsoft and no one I knew worked more than 30-40 hours a week. And this included at least an hour for lunch every day and multiple hours of just browsing the internet/wasting time, using office amenities or roaming around the campus. Some divisions are probably different, but calling Microsoft employees overworked is a joke.
mynameisash 6y ago
I've been at Microsoft for about eight years (which still makes me a relative newbie). I've been on several teams (changing roles by choice) and had many managers (due to new roles or reorgs). Depending on my family life, commute, work projects, etc., I have had seasons where I would stay late. Many times, I've had my managers walk by my office and say, "Go home to your family. Work will be here tomorrow." When I was at Amazon, on the other hand, I was usually in the office about 6:30am and would go home about 4 or 5pm. (I was new to big tech and wanted to prove myself.) The younger guys on my team were more 11am - 8pm, so I was always seen as being the guy that left early. And it showed in my relationships with my manager and skip-level, which is a big part of why I left. So with my n=1 experience, Microsoft is significantly better with work-life balance than Amazon. I can't speak for other big tech. I know this hasn't always been the case - I've heard horror stories from earlier in the Ballmer years, but we're not in the Ballmer years anymore, thank goodness. I'll also say that there are plenty of times where I *love* what I'm doing and actively put in lots of time because it's fun, not due to pressure to do so. But I've done that at other companies, and I know lots of people that have that passion for what they're doing.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  What team were on at Amazon? Seems like that can be a big fzctor

vbtemp 6y ago

I heard that they have the best work-life balance of any of the big tech co, in exchange for having the lowest salary/equity. Oh well...

throwaways885 6y ago
Isn't Google a better place for WLB? I too have heard bad things about Microsoft.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Google seems to be the gold standard.

filoleg 6y ago

Were your friends working in Azure or were you interviewing in Azure? Asking because Azure is the only place where I've heard about it (and even then, rarely). I have friends all over MSFT (at their main Redmond HQ campus, not remote offices), and no one outside of Azure works over 40/week. The occasional overtimes/crunches happen so infrequently, they could count the number of those days per year on one hand. And even an average workweek frequently falls under 40/week (all engineering btw, cannot comment on other positions like PM or design). I honestly am baffled by your info, because Microsoft definitely has a reputation here for being one of the more "relaxed" tech companies. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons I am staying, because I could definitely make noticeably more by switching to another tech giant, but I don't want to lose my work-life balance, as it isn't easy to find at all.

whimsicalism 6y ago
My SO is on a team on Microsoft where they are expected to not infrequently work weekends and work until 8 PM. e: Thought this was outside of Azure, but I was wrong
- filoleg 6y ago
  Sorry to hear that, and I realize that what I said is as much of anecdata as what you said, but this sounds more like an exception. Those exceptions do happen. For example, Amazon is known to be a brutal meatgrinder for engineers, and most of the experiences I've heard of from people I know irl support that assertion. That reputation isn't a secret to absolutely anyone. However, there are definitely those rare few teams at Amazon that are actually quite nice about work-life balance and are extremely functional, without any usual bs you would expect from an average Amazon team. But those teams are absolutely an exception. Is your SO on Xbox by any chance? Not asking it to invalidate what you have said, I am just genuinely curious. Plus, it would be another good datapoint for me to be aware of in the future. I was guessing Xbox because anything gaming-related is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about insane work hours.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Ah okay - actually the team they are on is within Azure, my fault for getting that wrong. Seeing them WFH has been really eye-opening on how bad & micromanaging managers can get.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
I spent 8 years in engineering at MS in the 2000s--it was no worse or better than any other tech company. There was never an explicit expectation to work more than 40 hours, and most managers were good about not pressuring people into disturbing work-life balance. But, at the end of the year you were calibrated against all of your peers and WLB was not a criteria that mattered. If you just put in your 40 hours you probably wouldn't get fired, but you definitely were not going to be promoted when compared to the people cranking out more work per week. There was a big divide with the younger, fresher folks working all the time (and making their work very visible). Once you were a senior dev you kind of had a choice to make--if you wanted to keep a high 'promotional velocity' you had to keep working >40 hour weeks or be left in the dust. If you didn't want to climb that ladder then it was totally fine but you would never be promoted beyond another level or two. I knew folks who were senior devs for 10, 15, or even more years. In contrast the partners/high performers were all regularly getting promotions every 2 years or less and absolutely none of them I knew worked less than 60-80 hours a week. To get promoted up to principal and beyond levels required having a consistent history of promotions every couple years--there was no way to really pause or slow down without stopping your entire career development. From my friends still left there I don't think much has changed over the years. It's a somewhat subtle system where managers and HR can proudly point to never requiring people to work crunch time. They can trot out plenty of 10 year senior engineers to give quotes and talk about how it's so great to just work 40 hour weeks. But at the end of the day if you want to be successful and rise up the ranks at MS, you are going to be working all the time, period (at least until you reach partner level).

snakeboy 6y ago

Is 50 hours that crazy? Does anyone else feel like these days they put in well above 40 hours a week doing WFH? Granted, during the day I can't stay 100% focused in my apartment, so I waste maybe an hour throughout the day online. Then I feel guilty and stay online well into the evening/weekends. I can't meet my deadlines otherwise.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Over the long haul? yeah it is. Some people absolutely adore their work, so 50 or even 60 hours is nothing. The majority of us though 40 hours is plenty.
mikestew 6y ago
Is 50 hours that crazy? I dunno, an extra 25% over what is normally expected? What exactly is your threshold for a ticket on the Crazy Train?
DocTomoe 6y ago
In large parts of the western world, 50 hours is actively illegal and opens the company up for legal trouble with the state.
haswell 6y ago
50 hours can mean the difference between: - Getting a healthy amount of sleep or not - Having time to eat a proper breakfast or not - Having time to prepare dinner (vs. order out) - Getting that evening bike ride in before dark or not - And on and on I can't help but feel your response to this is part of the problem. 50 hours is a lot of hours, and we shouldn't normalize it. This was less clear to me earlier in my career. I held a similar viewpoint for awhile. As time went on, and I saw the long term impact on those around me, and eventually myself, I shifted my viewpoint greatly.
- Arrath 6y ago
  >I can't help but feel your response to this is part of the problem. 50 hours is a lot of hours, and we shouldn't normalize it. While I absolutely agree with you, my career first as a union laborer and now a construction field engineer have really jaded me to the count of hours. It can be very different across different industries. On my current project Engineers are expected to be present to support field operations, which means starting before the craft workers to ensure everything is ready for the day (possibly as early as 0500) while still being here until 1700 like any other 'office job'; its pretty outrageous. At least when I was a laborer I was hourly. What can be done to fight the normalization of this? For myself, I fought my way to a senior engineer position and lobbied for a larger staff. Now I not only have enough people to do the job, but we stagger our shifts out to each get around 8hr/day while ensuring full coverage for our field guys throughout their shift. I've worked to instill a culture of "hey you've been here long enough, go the fuck home" with my team. But it took too long to get to this point, and much more tooth and nail fighting than it should have to convince higher ups of the need for what they saw as 'excess staffing', even for my department which is very much production critical.

paxys 6y ago

I have worked at Microsoft and no one I knew worked more than 30-40 hours a week. And this included at least an hour for lunch every day and multiple hours of just browsing the internet/wasting time, using office amenities or roaming around the campus. Some divisions are probably different, but calling Microsoft employees overworked is a joke.

mynameisash 6y ago

I've been at Microsoft for about eight years (which still makes me a relative newbie). I've been on several teams (changing roles by choice) and had many managers (due to new roles or reorgs). Depending on my family life, commute, work projects, etc., I have had seasons where I would stay late. Many times, I've had my managers walk by my office and say, "Go home to your family. Work will be here tomorrow." When I was at Amazon, on the other hand, I was usually in the office about 6:30am and would go home about 4 or 5pm. (I was new to big tech and wanted to prove myself.) The younger guys on my team were more 11am - 8pm, so I was always seen as being the guy that left early. And it showed in my relationships with my manager and skip-level, which is a big part of why I left. So with my n=1 experience, Microsoft is significantly better with work-life balance than Amazon. I can't speak for other big tech. I know this hasn't always been the case - I've heard horror stories from earlier in the Ballmer years, but we're not in the Ballmer years anymore, thank goodness. I'll also say that there are plenty of times where I *love* what I'm doing and actively put in lots of time because it's fun, not due to pressure to do so. But I've done that at other companies, and I know lots of people that have that passion for what they're doing.

moneywoes 6y ago
What team were on at Amazon? Seems like that can be a big fzctor