Other than stock option program as mentioned in case what can be the other opportunities for compensating employees.
What Drives Employees at Microsoft?
The reality of software development in a huge company like Microsoft (it employs
more than 48,000 people) is that a substantial portion of your work involves days of
boredom punctuated by hours of tedium. You basically spend your time in an isolated
office writing code and sitting in meetings during which you participate in looking for
and evaluating hundreds of bugs and potential bugs. Yet Microsoft has no problem in
finding and retaining software programmers. Their programmers work horrendously long
hours and obsess on the goal of shipping product.
From the day new employees begin work at Microsoft; they know they are special
and that their employer is special. New hires all have one thing in common—they are
smart. The company prides itself on putting all recruits through a grueling “interview
loop,” during which they confront a barrage of brain-teasers by future colleagues to see
how well they think. Only the best and the brightest survive to become employees. The
company does this because Microsofties truly believe that their company is special. For
instance, it has a high tolerance for nonconformity. Would you believe that one software
tester comes to work every day dressed in extravagant Victorian outfits? But the
underlying theme that unites Microsofties is the belief that the firm has a manifest destiny
to change the world. The least consequential decision by a programmer can have an
outsized importance when it can affect a new release that might be used by 50 million
people.
Microsoft employees are famous for putting in long hours. One program manager
said, “In my first five years, I was the Microsoft stereotype. I lived on caffeine and
vending-machine hamburgers and free beer and 20-hour workdays. . . . I had no life. . . . I
considered everything outside the building as a necessary evil.” More recently, things
have changed. There are still a number of people, who put in 80-hour weeks, but 60- and
70-hour weeks are more typical and some even are doing their jobs in only 40 hours.
No discussion of employee life at Microsoft would be complete without mentioning
the company’s lucrative stock option program. Microsoft created more millionaire
employees, faster, than any company in American history—more than 10,000 by the late-
1990s. While the company is certainly more than a place to get rich, executives still
realize that money matters. One former manager claims that the human resources’
department actually kept a running chart of employee satisfaction versus the company’s
stock price. “When the stock was up, human resources could turn off the ventilation and
everybody would say they were happy. When the stock was down, we could give people
massages and they would tell us that the massages were too hard.” In the go-go 1990s,
when Microsoft stock was doubling every few months and yearly stock splits were
predictable, employees not only got to participate in Microsoft’s manifest destiny, but
they could get rich in the process. By the spring of 2002, with the world in a recession,
stock prices down, and the growth for Microsoft products slowing, it was not so clear
what was driving its employees to continue the company’s dominance of the software
industry.
Is this homework? Sounds like homework
January 30th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Is this homework? Sounds like homework
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