The Seattle "Eastside" is not really Seattle, it's Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah and Sammamish - overpriced suburbs. I live in one of them and work at MSFT.
I mostly agree with your assessment of the culture. I have been here for 6.5 years and have never seen source tree, I work in Azure and everything is in Azure Devops and we commit and deploy chaotically.
Very few people are level 70. It means VP or Distinguished Engineer. Probably far less than <1% of the company. These people are making over $1m a year most likely, if not more. For Microsoft, that is big money. They don't pay like Meta or the AI labs. We are more comparable in pay to Amazon and other 2nd/3rd tier big tech companies.
I hope they would. I'm just comparing MSFT compensation for a SWE in the USA which might range from 150k-400k per year unless you get to quite high levels, with companies like Meta, nvidia, openAI, Anthropic where someone might make 1m a year with 2 years of experience due to crazy stock appreciation and very high offers for specific domain expertise
It seems to depend on your level (above or below L65 which is first Principal rung). 12 months of health insurance is nice, but the pay seems to be between 3-9 months worth of pay depending on various factors.
It's something like
- 3 months base salary
- plus either 2 weeks or 1 month of pay per year of service (the former if you are at principal level or above)
- 12 months health insurance
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day. This has been happening at Microsoft for the last few years, sometimes in large waves. Many of these people were not egregious non-performers, just people who had been marked as not quite meeting expectations, and thought they had another chance.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day.
That's generally not legal in the U.S. or most of the EU. The company would have to establish a very significant paper trail to establish that these individual "performance-based" layoffs were not part of a layoff subject to WARN regulations (or their European equivalents which are even stricter). The hurdle is so large that no company has successfully pulled off such a feat, and many of the companies that tried ended up paying significantly more in penalties to their local Depts of Labor than they would have saved with this stunt.
I don't really know the legality of it, but I can tell you that last year around April there was quite a big wave of sudden performance terminations within Microsoft and these people did not get severance. I know because I was a manager of one of these people and had to deliver the news. I know that many of these people had had a below 100 rating on their previous performance review, but we were unaware at the time that this meant a death sentence for these employees several months later when we got the email a few days in advance of the termination. It was hundreds, if not thousands of affected people.
What's legal and what's enforceable are two different things. Also the US is extremely muddy in these legal waters because, sure, Federal laws and the Department of Labor are supposed to enforce such actions. But most US states are "At-Will Employment" states which means that companies do not even have to provide a reason for a termination, which means there's no paperwork that really gets sent to the Department of Labor to enforce anything at all.
(Not to mention that companies have spent decades perfecting the "layoffs are coming in a quarter or two, send out performance reviews now and encourage managers to be extra 'honest' and nitpick everything so that we have a written record just in case we need to fire people for performance to make the layoff seem smaller" dance, including Stack Ranking being built to be that smoke 100% of the year, every year. Still technically illegal, but if the quiet parts aren't said out loud who are you going to believe, the months ahead of time paperwork in performance reviews or that executives decided they needed harsh performance reviews months in advance on a golf course somewhere? It's not a conspiracy when it's so easy to pull off.)
Mass terminations without timely notice, or pay in lieu of notice, are not. Disguising a mass termination as a collection of "performance" based individual terminations is a method that many companies have tried and failed, because...get this...WARN regulations in the US and EU don't care about the reasons for termination unless it's a "for cause" termination and you absolutely need to document the cause for those.
I just saw Julian Lage a few nights ago here in Seattle - it was so great. I went alone and soaked it in. I'm not even really a jazz fan, but as a lifelong guitarist he is undeniable. He had John Medeski on organ and piano and it was absolutely sublime.
I've been recording myself at home for many years (I write songs on guitar and sing, and some other instruments), and this really resonates with me.
When I sing and play guitar at the same time (which creates recording challenges with mic bleed and phase cancellation), and especially without a click track, there is an undeniable difference and there is magic in that difference. But the perfectionist in me wants to present a polished recording, so I end up "comping" (recording many times and picking the "best" bits), using a metronome, and a bit of gridifying, although usually just with drums if I played them. I draw the line at vocal tuning, I just can't.
This blog post is nothing new to me, I've had these thoughts a thousand times. But it's a great reminder. Especially in the age of AI. Our imperfection and vulnerability is our gift.
I wonder how good it sounds. I could see my kid using this for Spotify, I current have to keep reminding her to AirPlay her iPad to our old homepods so she isn't always listening to tiny, shrill audio.
It seems totally inappropriate to play an AI video in court, but it seems like a waste of resources to waste more court time on this. But also, how can you murder someone and get only 10 years in prison?
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