How Microsoft Ended a Promising Career

Yesterday saw me return to my place of work / house of pain for my belated and delayed leaving do. Stomach turned just approaching the building. The scars run deep.

Interesting to observe the same people in the same environment, but from the outside. Majority of people arrived late and flustered - clearly emerging from another disastrously badly managed meeting. Everyone distracted and pretty keen to get out of there, but hanging around on the off-chance that my boss or I will say something controversial. But boss made a nice speech and I was massively chuffed with the gift.

As an outsider with time to think, I've realised now why I left. And it's all the fault of Microsoft. I'm not going to lay into the company like lots of people do, but just pick up on one design flaw. Specifically that the shortest time a meeting can last in Outlook is 30 mins. Even worse, the default duration is 1 hour. So people set up meetings for 1 hour (how can their meeting be less important / complicated etc. than the 'default'?).

I'd say most meetings I ever attended should have been complete in 15 mins. Because people know they have the full hour, they arrive late, make a helluva lot of small talk, get off the topic etc. But the biggest issue is people don't want to return to their desk (which I'll come onto below); they want to prove their worth because meetings are the only chance they have to demonstrate it, so they raise irrelevant issues or facts to fill time and in general over-complicate the issue at hand. Cue confusion. Cue no decision. Cue fact that when / if a decision is eventually made on the matter either a) it will 'offend' someone because so many counterpoints have been raised or b) It's so compromised and watered down it's not really a decision at all.

In the meantime guys don't want to return to their desks because the people writing emails are doing so only between meetings or after work hours. At these times people are either rushed (cue: email for the sake of it, typically trying to pass problem onto other people, not taking any action to progress conversation forward which is depressing to read in itself) or in a horrific mood (cue: angry email setting off a long unpleasant email conversation, bosses getting copied in, no-one wanting to make decisions because every one's waiting to go off on one, so eventually is generally agreed that a meeting is required, which can't happen for at least a week because every one's diaries are booked out with more meetings). So quick, simple decisions explode into cataclysmic hassles and no decision is made for a month and when it is the blood letting doesn't end.

The cycle is endless and the spiral is downwards. Everyone complains about number of meetings, but there's no incentive to get out of it, really. I saw the problem early on, but in the end I was actually quite happy when my diary was booked back-to-back because it meant I didn't have to actually think or get on with the tough calls, plus I had a genuine excuse not to get on with work.

So Microsoft have caused massive reductions in productivity, pre-mature ageing and stress and bad decisions being made. This was why I left. If they could allow for 15 min meetings and have that as a default, the world would be a happier place.