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Comment by rlu | Hacker News Reader

Did you ever consider changing teams or org? The review process is of course standard throughout all of MS but a lot of your complaints seemed to be local to your team (e.g. status report noise) or Org ("Office needs robots"). Bug triaging might also be less of a bore now that microsoft seems to be moving to yearly release cycles.

Either way, seems like you ended up making the right decision for yourself. Congrats!

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I worked in many different parts of Microsoft over 10 years and I can tell you that the culture doesn't change enough from team to team to make up for this sort of thing.

I did consider switching teams briefly, but at the end of the day I actually had a pretty great team compared to what a lot of people I was friends with would describe to me. The issues I had were definitely not limited to just my team (I talked with plenty of my friends on other teams who had similar issues and a lot of other ones that I was lucky I didn't have on my team). The process also takes time, and usually only happens after a release, or if you are at least at a level 60 (which can take a couple years).

I don't know OP or Microsoft, but usually once companies build the Enron-style performance reviews (stack ranking, high stakes, lots of horse-trading behind the scenes) it becomes really difficult to move internally, because (a) anyone with less than a top-25% review history-- remember that those top-25% scores must be sustained over years, so it might be 15-20% who qualify-- becomes undesirable as a transfer applicant, and (b) managers don't give good reviews to people they see as likely to leave the team if given wings. The result of all this nonsense is that people get stuck where they spawn.

That's why companies that stack rank and make performance reviews part of the transfer packet always-- there are no exceptions to this in the long run-- end up with the warring departments phenomenon for which Microsoft is notorious.

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