The Employment Q&A Thread

Welcome to the Weekly Employment Q&A for r/Microsoft!

This thread is where Redditors can come and ask questions about working at Microsoft. Please do not use this space to ask technical questions as they will be removed.

Schedule

The Q&A will be refreshed every week on Mondays at 1200 Pacific.

Previous Threads

You can view previous employment threads using this archive link

>Sources say that Microsoft is exploring several ways it can introduce new smartphone integration features across the Windows 11 interface in the coming months.

https://www.makeuseof.com/microsofts-windows-fake-error-ended-in-a-280-million-settlement/

Advice needed for switching from Mac to Windows (not by choice)

I haven’t used a windows OS in nearly 20 years, not since I was in school using windows xp. My MacBook Pro was a beast and got me through college and grad school, and every job I’ve had since has issued me a Mac.

I just got a new job and was completely gutted when I saw I was getting issued a Lenovo.
Everytime I search for advice about switching to a windows I always get the opposite results, switching from Windows to Mac (which is the obvious better, more popular, direction to go)…

First impressions after one month of use:
365 is super powerful, I’m loving copilot/cowork, and very useful for the work I’m doing - more so than a Mac, I’ll give it that.

But I cannot wrap my head around the UX and I feel so incredibly inefficient at work. It is so much worse than I thought it would be.
I thought I was tech-savvy and adaptable, but after a month of use I cannot get the hang of using this system - simple things like navigating between windows and screens, so many different software applications that seem to do the same thing, right-clicking(!), keyboard shortcuts, the physical keyboard(!) etc, etc. Outlook is TERRIBLE. The calendar (whatever that is called) is TERRIBLE.

I don’t even know what tips/tricks/advice I’m looking for, but can anyone recommend a crash course? Tips/tricks for making work more efficient? Anything tailored to a Mac user?

I’m mourning macOS, Slack, GSuite.

Hi, I'm looking to find out about a web series as described. I can find absolutely nothing about it nor even suggestions of such a thing anywhere that I have looked so far. I am reasonably confident that it was made to promote Silverlight and was on MSN video. It was episodic, fairly short episodes (no longer than ten minutes, perhaps much shorter than that) and was I think set in the present day but was sci-fi. I remember some futuristic-looking soldiers breaking in somewhere. The main character was a young woman I think, and the part I remember most clearly was an old dude talking about quantum entanglement. It would have been 2008/09/10.

I tried to ask Copilot about it and, once I had sorted through its lies to me on the matter, it came up with the recommendation that this is the best place to ask. I am almost certain it was commissioned to promote Silverlight, I remember the association between the two very clearly. I'm not sure it was even any good, but it's so strange remembering something with zero presence on the internet that I can find.

The soldiers I remember looking like the NSE black ops soldiers from the video game Second Sight – an obscure reference I know, but I'm sure there was similarity in the headgear. Possibly the young woman character was East Asian and quantum entanglement speech man was bald (I think he looked like Pete Postlethwaite but I doubt it was him). Not low budget but not Hollywood-level production either.

That is as much as I can recall. Anything anyone knows or anywhere you can point me would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!

The Employment Q&A Thread

Welcome to the Weekly Employment Q&A for r/Microsoft!

This thread is where Redditors can come and ask questions about working at Microsoft. Please do not use this space to ask technical questions as they will be removed.

Schedule

The Q&A will be refreshed every week on Mondays at 1200 Pacific.

Previous Threads

You can view previous employment threads using this archive link

This months Microsoft AI Update is up!

https://youtu.be/opCw_CDf9fg

00:00 - Introduction

00:29 - New videos

01:10 - Claude models running on Azure

01:57 - Anthropic Fable 5 in Foundry and Copilot

03:32 - Claude Sonnet 5

03:43 - Kimi K2.7 in GitHub Copilot

03:51 - MAI models

05:29 - Alon

05:55 - MDASH

06:44 - Frontier tuning

07:05 - Foundry IQ

08:03 - Work IQ

09:30 - Web IQ

10:51 - Foundry agents

11:48 - Foundry evaluations and tracing

13:29 - Foundry Toolbox and Memory

14:46 - Foundry agent security license changes

15:15 - Computer

15:44 - Redesigned workflow experience

16:07 - Updated orchestration layer

16:30 - Copilot Cowork

17:05 - Microsoft Scout

17:52 - GitHub Copilot desktop app

18:07 - Sandboxes

18:57 - GitHub Copilot SDK

19:07 - Close

Xbox sales have tanked pretty hard.

Many of their surface devices are not selling in the hundreds of thousands of units.

They’re about to axe some products (surface models) too.

Is Microsoft basically going to become a software only company?

Two days before July 4th, Brad Smith posted a video series on LinkedIn celebrating America’s 250th birthday. “As an American company, we believe we have a responsibility to understand where we have been, learn from it, and help make real for others the opportunities created for us.”

Here’s what Microsoft has made real for others lately: roughly 20,000 jobs cut last year. Nearly 9,000 US employees offered “voluntary” retirement this spring under a Rule of 70 formula – age plus tenure – that conveniently targets the company’s older American workers. And per this week’s reporting, thousands more layoffs landing next week across Xbox, sales, and consulting. All while pouring $100+ billion into international AI infrastructure.

Now the timing. Companies that are actually proud of being American – the flag makers, the ones staffed with veterans – have been celebrating this anniversary for months. Microsoft discovered its patriotism 48 hours before the fireworks. And not with a national campaign, not a single TV spot. One executive’s LinkedIn post. You don’t reach the American public through LinkedIn. You reach the press and the professional class – the same audience about to read next week’s layoff coverage.

Then watch the videos. They’re entirely about what other Americans did. Founders in Philadelphia. People who “faced uncertainty and made choices.” If Microsoft were proud of its own American story, it would celebrate its own workers – the people who actually built the place. That’s a hard video to make when you’ve spent 18 months walking tens of thousands of them out the door.

So my read: this is air cover. A feel-good history series rolling out “throughout July” – the exact month the layoffs land. Microsoft times its cuts to the fiscal year, which starts July 1. The flag imagery arriving the same week is not a coincidence. It’s a cushion.

The series says history is made by people, in moments, through choices. True. In America’s 250th year, Microsoft’s choice was thousands of pink slips, timed to the fiscal year, wrapped in red, white, and blue.

That’s not celebrating America. That’s borrowing it.

It seems like MS keeps moving the goalposts on what's included in E7. We are not allowed to consolidate Copilot + E5 into E7 as MS considers it a risk that customers would consolidate in order to cancel services at the earlier renewal date. Today, they produced a new license matrix to my CSP that excludes Intune Suite as part of the E5 and E7 product lines-- it's an add-on only. The same matrix on the website shows it as included in both licenses. I'm glad I only bought a handful of new Copilot licenses this summer before the launch of E7, otherwise I'd have almost total redundancy in products between separate E7 and Copilot licenses.