14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Robert Parks thought he had obtained his dream job when he was contacted by Microsoft to work at the company's headquarters in Redmond, but it all proved to be a fiasco because of a terrible boss, as he explains.
Parks' experience at Microsoft lasted for only four months during which he struggled to find his place within the company and get along with his boss, who picked on him repeatedly for no clear reason.
First of all, he explains in a lengthy blog post detailing his own experience at Microsoft that, when joining the software giant, he was included in the so-called New Employee Orientation or NEO, which is supposed to help new workers get around the company and discover the essentials.
For him, these essentials basically came down to meeting a few of what he calls “cheesy ice-breakers,” participating in some presentations about health insurance, watching a prerecorded message from Satya Nadella, and receiving general information about transportation.
“The day was ending. I still had no idea what was going on. I had been given the name of my manager and his office number, but he mysteriously didn’t show up on //who (a page on Microsoft’s intranet with bios of all Microsoft employees). I wasn’t even sure how to get home,” he writes.
The next day, when he finally found his manager's office, he was told that his boss was out of office until next Wednesday, so he “spent the first few days setting up my computer, taking care of some HR related tasks, and picking my co-workers brains about what I could do to be productive until our manager could assign me a real task.”
A nightmare boss
And this is where the bad part starts. Parks says that his manager returned from vacation the following week, so he was very excited to meet him and finally have something to do that could help the team. But the first meeting with his boss took place after only two weeks.
“The first item on the meeting’s agenda was apparently to browbeat me for not communicating with him enough. It was a sentiment I couldn’t believe he could hold unironically considering the context, but somehow he did. The next item on the agenda was to browbeat me for not communicating enough with my teammates,” Parks writes.
He never had the chance to defend himself. Whenever he was trying to say something, the manager interrupted him and changed the subject.
Minutes after the first meeting, when Parks was replaying “the meeting over in my head, trying to make sense of it,” he received a message that his boss wanted to see him again in his office.
“He sat me down and asked, ‘do you feel like this team isn’t a good fit for you?’ I was really at a loss of words at that point. I had no idea what motivated him to ask that question. I didn’t see how saying ‘yes’ would benefit me in any way, so in my state of confusion I mumbled something about how I think the project sounds really interesting.”
The resignation
Everything went from bad to worse, and in the next few weeks, his boss criticized him on every single occasion, even though there was no clear reason for him to do that. He was picking on him, but he seemed to be okay with all the other members of the team.
“At some point we got another new hire on our team. Before he showed up our manager told us all about him and seemed genuinely excited. When he showed up on his first day our manager immediately held a meeting with him, after which he toured him around the office and introduced him to the whole team. That’s when I realized something was really off.”
“I told a couple of my coworkers in private about the way our manager had been treating me and asked they shared similar experiences. They were so surprised that I’m not even sure they believed me.”
So after four months spent at Microsoft, he finally decided to resign because of his boss. It took no less than two days for the manager to send an email to the HR in order to make the paperwork, and during this whole time, nobody even noticed that he was missing.
Before anything, it's important to note that this is just one side of the story and there's no doubt that working for such a huge company can have its ups and downs. In the end, it's pretty clear that Satya Nadella's dream of having One Microsoft that works as a whole needs more time to happen, especially behind closed doors.