- Kind and talented co-workers
- Generous AI token spend
- Fairly transparent company (has been getting less transparent over the years)
- Lots of opportunity for impact
Kontras
- Product management discipline is quite lacking since the new CTO joined
- Microsoft culture is adding more chaos and stress, and causing projects to actually go slower
- Managers are afraid to tell the truth to Mikhail about the loopholes in engineering; they just want to look good, so they rush their teams to ship crap
- Top engineering leaders are moving out of management roles or leaving the company
- Tobi used to be far more involved in ensuring a high engineering bar, but seems to have handed over the reins to the new Microsoft regime