Microsoft Employee Culture

The average Microsoft employee, or "Softie" as they call themselves, is a 38-year-old male with the average salary for a developer coming in at $106,000 (Elliott, 2010). This number shows as, the company  that dominate the personal computer operating system market, valued their employee really high compared to the average of united state professional degree just $82,473 (2011, 2003).

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of products and services related to computing. The company that On August 23rd, 2012, unveiled their new corporate logo at the opening of its 23rd Microsoft store in Boston was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4th, 1975. So, the fact that the salary of Microsoft employee is very high makes millions of people willing to do anything for jobs in this world's largest software maker company.

Employee is one of the most important elements in the company or organization. Microsoft currently employs 88,180 people who work across 32,404,796 square feet of Microsoft’s premises, over 50,000 of which are U.S.-based. The male to female ratio is very high among Microsoft’s American employees with a staggering 76% male workforce (Li, 2011). As I mention before it has been a culture of Microsoft to give really high salary to its employee, but a salary is actually just a starter to attract the most capable people to join the corporation. After the company that has headquartered in Redmond, Washington gets its raw material (employee), the company makes them competed each other to stimulate the employee to do better jobs.

One of the former micros employees says in one of his articles. ‘’I used to work at MSFT, but I left four years ago. Part of the reason I left was that the environment inside the company is dog-eat-dog. For each person who gets a "good" performance review, an equal number of people must receive a "bad" performance review. This leads to cutthroat internal competition, a lack of empathy or friendship in the office, and generally an unfriendly environment. The atmosphere of the campus is great, the benefits are great, the pay is great, but the people you work with are definitely out to stab you in the back’’ (Hancock, 2010). This article is from one of the former employee of this company that acquisition Skype on October 13th, 2011. He seems not really comfortable with the culture that occurred in this company, but he still admits that Microsoft pay really good money. Is Microsoft really paying good money?

Another article from former Microsoft employee says almost the same thing too. ’’ I spent over a decade at MSFT, only recently leaving because I finally got sick of it. Backstabbing, behind the back, everything on this page is true, except for the "above average $$$ per hour". Perhaps ten years ago, but MSFT has not kept up. They are barely 50th percentile these days. Have a look around, you can get better pay and MUCH better work conditions elsewhere these days. MSFT is a "has been"’’ (Duvall, 2010). This article is even worst, because he just wrote that Microsoft is no longer pay as good as they did 10 years ago. This articles got so many pro and con in the comment, but the most important thing here, that we know Microsoft culture is to make their employee compete each other beside the fact they pay good money or not.

To sum up, the culture of the company that holds over 10,000 patents and files around 3,000 every year, ranking as one of the top five patent owners in the U.S. applied is not a good culture in the employee's point of view. Although Microsoft pay a lot of money to keep employee fired up with their job, some of the employee not really comfortable because this culture makes the employee compete and even fight each other to stand still or get a bonus. Actually this culture in not bad after all because, with this culture the company always gets the best job from their employee, the employee gets good salary and the society can experiences Microsoft product which always up-to-date in the order to make life's easier. I don't think so this culture can be change so easily because if this culture changed, the performance of Microsoft will decrease and it will influence the stability of the company that will make a lot of people lost their job. As an observer I suggest that Microsoft to keep it up what they have been doing for the last decade because the existence as one of the biggest company in the world has proofed of their good culture.