Today marks a month since I have left Microsoft. I worked at Microsoft for about
4.8 years and worked on the same product since I arrived there. The main reasons
I chose to quit was mostly financial and lack of interest in the product. Noticing
the financial cliff that comes after working at a big tech company for 4 years,
I chose to use this time to re-evaluate my interests and take a much needed break.
The events that happened in this year-to-date also contributed to my departure,
but I would say it mostly tipped the financial scale. If I was paid more, I would
have attempted to actually resolve the issues that I will be describing below.
For most of the 2026, I learned quite a bit about the industry and the realities
of dealing with pressure from leadership. This pressure would trickle down to you
in the form of your managers increasing expectations on your already large workload.
During the holidays of 2025 after my previous manager left the company, I chose
to spend more time working in proving my worth to my new manager. I will name this manager
Charlie. During the month of December, it is common for people at Microsoft to
take the whole month off. Usually I would fly back to my hometown and spend time
with my parents. I would work as Christmas wasn't too big of a thing in my household.
During the last two weeks, there was an issue with how our application interacted
with a specific plugin. The plugin was owned by another team in the company
and they needed help with troubleshooting the issue. They were also adamant that
we should be owning the bug. I did not have any experience nor knowledge of the
interface in our application that works with plugins, but I was the only responsive
person to the team. Alas I got looped into the discussions and troubleshooting.
I helped the team with getting the telemetry data and spent a little time
providing test builds.
While trying to provide test builds, I made silly mistakes in giving links that
they did not have permissions and such. I would correct the links and re-provide
them the versions. During this process, Charlie would attempt to coach me and
tell me that he wants me to "do better" in terms of providing the links and be more
responsive to the team.
This experience soured me, and I also noticed that Charlie did not quite understand
how our application really worked. In their coaching feedback, they glossed over
small details and told me to provide information that I provided from the start
of the investigation. The overall tech stack did not seem clear to them.
Coming into 2026, our designated a set of people to tackle tech debt and bugs.
I thought this was rather silly as I always thought high priority bugs should
just get tackled and customer facing things get squashed ASAP. Any other bugs
need to get scheduled and fixed accordingly. This began about 3 months of non-stop
bug investigation and fixing.
Eventually Charlie became my skip manager and a new manager joined to replace
my previous manager. I will name this manager Alpha. Alpha was a younger person
and joined the company when there was a incident filed against our application.
This incident was from a bug that I wrote in a security fix around the start of
2026. I could go into incredible detail in why this bug wasn't actually my mistake,
but explaining this to Charlie and Alpha were all seens as excuses. I dealt
with the issue swiftly, but this incident would be held over my head until the
week I left Microsoft.
This incident alone blocked my promotion for that year and put me in a negative
light for both Charlie and Alpha. Alpha took on all the impressions and learnings
of how to manage me from Charlie and their impression on my stayed steadfast.
Expectations were higher on me and my performance was seen as unacceptable despite
working long hours to rescue it. I fixed myriads of bugs and even helped Alpha
with his deliverables when they were stuck on any issues on it. By the end of May 2026,
I felt like I was trapped with no way out of this.
Quickly my morale was dashed and going to work became a huge burden on my mental.
I became very impatient with others and began whispering to myself about how much
I disliked work whenever I was alone. A decently sized tenure that I built was
slowly eroding. I knew I was going to leave the company by the end of the year,
but the events still affected me quite a bit.
Very little work was getting done and I had no interest in the future work
that was going to get assigned to me. I put in my two weeks at the start of August
and basically no-showed for several days within my last weeks at the company.
During this time, Charlie and Alpha would give a decent impression as they
understood why I suddenly did not show up, but reflecting on it now; I wished
I no showed the whole two weeks when I was not guaranteed by severance by Alpha.
This was a quick summary timeline of my 2026 so far. The choice to leave was 100%
the correct decision and I am very happy the moment I did it. My time at Microsoft
was interesting, and I will write a more detailed blog about the things I learned
while working at this big tech company.