Contract work at Microsoft for older workers?

Question

Can anyone provide a description of what an older new contractor at Microsoft may expect in terms of career growth? I'm guessing that there's an implicit bias toward full time recruitment of college level or junior/younger workers, with older full time hires being primarily marquee names like Don Box. Surely some people get converted to full time after competency demonstration (I can imagine that this would come from long hours and lots of typing and bug fixing), perhaps more conversions took place in the pre-Obama era?

I heard that there's some sort of restriction on the number of weeks a contractor can work during a year period there. This probably grew out of the "permatemps" lawsuit they had to settle years ago.

Answer 1

Although I cannot comment on the first part of your question, I can address the last part.

I was listening to a 'herding code' archived podcast this morning on my commute to work and the "permatemp" lawsuit was specifically mentioned. The host commented that in Washington state, contractors are allowed to work a maximum of 9 months in one year for a single employer.

Answer 2

If I recall correctly, Microsoft's solution to the permatemp issue was to have outside firms do the hiring.

Since they're technically employed by the recruiting firm, there's no issue of them being a contractor in a legal sense.

Here's a really good description of how that permatemps case affected everyone including Microsoft.

http://library.findlaw.com/2000/Feb/1/127759.html

G-Man

Answer 3

My experience:

I worked as a contractor through a company in Dallas for about three years before I was finally hired full time. I was in Product Support Services, and supported Microsoft Mail for PC Networks (yes, that long ago ;) and moved from that to IIS 3.0 (back when it was part of the NT Option Pack.) Finally, after a long slog and much campaigning, the Microsoft manager of my group hired me full time to support Internet Explorer Administration Kit.

This was peachy for about a year, until the next re-org. Found myself in "Desktop Support," supporting Win9x and IE. Not exactly a challenging position. I was prevented from getting back into a Backoffice support group. This was probably a good thing, as I was getting burned out on support. I went ahead and accepted a contract position developing classic ASP. This began my career as a software developer.

My fulltime hire was a replacement for an engineer that was moving to Redmond to start a job as a developer. I believe he was there for about six months, then decided to return to Dallas. He gave me the impression that the job was not what he was expecting.

Don't get me wrong- I enjoyed my time there and learned a LOT. This was a long time ago, so things may be different now. I have heard that MS is planning to lay off FTE workers, so getting converted may be especially difficult under these economic circumstances.