It’s been a week since I joined Microsoft, I’m mostly happy about it so far.

As I expected, there are many required training for new hires, topics like unconscious bias are at the top of the list, which I regard as important, yet it’s rarely mentioned elsewhere.

I haven’t used Windows as my desktop, nor have I owned any device running it for a decade or so. Interestingly, when I received my workstation for work with Windows 10, I found myself skilled at both using and customizing it. One of my colleagues was surprised “why are you so skilled at using Windows, given that you are a Mac user”, “Guess I was a pretty skilled power user on Windows before I got my first MacBook” I replied. That’s when I realized how surprisingly smooth I adapted to the new Windows workstation.

I have to say Windows 10 is pretty delightful to use on a workstation with dozens of cores, tens of gigabytes of memory, a large SSD and a well-managed enterprise domain—all in the biggest enterprise cloud on this planet. I’m still shocked that I’ve written this, as someone who has been fully migrated from Windows to macOS over a decade.

Here are some good things I’ve observed at Microsoft:

• The office is as quiet as a library most of the time
• People call each other by first names, no fancy titles nor offense taken
• Remote conferencing is smooth that
  • No laggy videos with pixelation or distorted faces
  • Clear audio—no more “Can you speak louder?”
  • Real-time transcripts on the screen
  • You don’t need to raise your voice or position yourself near the microphones to be heard online
• The default view on calendars is “work week” which blocks the non-working hours on weekdays and the entire weekend

Although I’ve been working overtime every single day on my first week (I don’t have to if I don’t want to), I can see that work and life are both respected, IMO, compared to many domestic companies, the foreign ones admit that employees do have their personal lifes, and it is something that they should live with so they choose to respect it. Meanwhile, domestic companies may ignore this or even deny the existence of this by discouraging employees from talking about it without feeling bad or having presure.

I’m not saying that domestic companies are bad simply because they are domestic, the foreign ones are there for a longer time so they are more mature on employing, I can see that domestic ones are learning because happy employees soaked within a healthy culture is healthier for big enterprises, it just takes time.

People tend to think that the larger the corporations, the higher the salary. However, Microsoft has a reputation for relatively modest pay, before joining in, I received offers with salaries much higher than what Microsoft offered, guess I’ll have to pay for my willfulness in the future.

I prefer living in modern places over the old and outmoded. After moving to Suzhou, I found that I don’t enjoy the oldest areas of the city. The good news is that I’ve found a modern area that’s as good as, if not better than, parts of Shanghai.