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Comment by syntaxing | Hacker News Reader

I always thought Microsoft was one of the tech companies with the best work life balance. Is this not the case? Is it because of the gender disparity/sexism? Can any share some insight how it's to work for MS in Mountain View? Is it a bad idea for someone starting a family?

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Microsoft has a great work-life balance most of the time. The writer of the article was in DX, which used to be an evangelist group, and they were one of the unlucky groups due to travel and preparing for events.

DX has now become CSE (Commercial Software Engineering) and instead of evangelizing, they now mainly write code (with some exceptions). One group in CSE works with customers on short-term hacks which span a couple of days, and another group works on long-term projects alongside engineers at external companies, helping them build cloud solutions.

These jobs do have travel, but it is not very much since remotely working with customers is a viable option. There is also a strong focus on ensuring they don’t work or travel too much because no one wants to burn out engineers.

CSE is actually a really cool org at Microsoft, and you can see some of the stuff they work on here: https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/

Microsoft is probably one of the best options you can pick if you want to have great WLB but still do worldwide impactful work - and majority of teams have good culture and are fun. At least that's the vibe I get from friends that work there.

I got a job at Microsoft through acquisition (not located in Redmond) and I gotta say, I am kinda loving it. Very challenging and good tools. Happy to be here. I think the Satya era is an improvement, from what I hear. To me they seem pretty serious about being a good environment for women.

Like any company, it varies quite a bit from team to team, organization to organization. I and most of my engineer friends at MS work 40 hour weeks consistently, but I do know a small handful of people (usually PMs or other non-tech roles) that work 50+ per week.

Yep. This sounds so different from all of my peers at Microsoft.

Across the board, the common thread among everyone I know at bigN, is how mundane it can feel.

I am joining MS next month, so I guess I will find out in time.

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