One of the best metrics I've found for assessing the health of a large organisation is how competent the support staff are. Generally, if the organisation isn't already collapsing, the people who are directly responsible for the core business are good at their jobs. But everything else is easy to cut corners in. Building management, reception staff, cleaners, IT, HR, administration, and so on are all easy to cut corners on. And all of these people do work that allows the people who are directly contributing to the core competency of the company to focus on their jobs. Every time that they fail to do their job, someone has to pick up the slack and that impacts overall productivity. When those people are doing a good job, the folks working on the core competency for the business can deliver close to 100% focus on it. When I started at Microsoft, this really stood out. The HR person who led me through the interview process was present, engaged, and supportive throughout. She was a contractor and they declined to make her an employee once the legal limit for contractors to not be treated as employees passed. The front-of-house person was amazing. He remembered my face from a time I'd attended a talk a year earlier. After I started, he performed a similar feat recognising a guests who hadn't been in the building for three or four years, directing them to the coffee machine and sending me a message letting me know that they were taken care of. If I had visitors, I knew that all I had to do was let him know they were coming and then stop thinking about it until I got the message that they'd arrived. And if I had an overrunning meeting and couldn't greet them at the agreed time (or if they arrived early), they'd be made welcome. He left shortly after the return to work and his replacement was fine but not exemplary. The most shocking thing was building services. In my previous job I'd turned my desk around and then had building services complain that it was a fire risk and had to jump through a load of hoops to show that, no, I do not need 100 people to be able to safely exit the building from behind me desk. My office at Microsoft had the desk with its back to the door and I wanted to be able to see the door and talk to people when they walked past if my door is open, so I asked if I could turn it around. I was immediately told 'no', but this was followed by 'let's come to your office and see what you need', then 'we'll need to move the floor plate to the other side of the room so you're not running power / network cables across the floor' and then 'can we do it tomorrow morning? If you can shut down the machine for an hour, we should be able to get it all done, can we do it while you're in a meeting?' And then it all happened. And, finally, the IT staff. Imagine doing IT support for someone with a Turing Award. Some of the people in the building invented the underlying technology for the systems you're supporting. Some of the others contributed directly to the code that you're supporting. I can't imagine doing IT support in that environment. And yet, the people on that team were amazing. And so Redmond decided that they didn't really need to exist and should be downsized and replaced with a remote support desk that couldn't fix any of the problems that the people in the building had (I wrote references for one of this team that was let go). One of the key signs that the company was being hollowed out from the inside was the decline in quality of these rôles and, especially, on the management decisions to not bother trying to retain the people who were amazing in these jobs. The stock price has gone up quite a bit since I left, but the market is a trailing indicator of how well a company is doing. I sold the last of my MSFT stock yesterday. I don't doubt that it will keep going up for a bit, but I can't predict when it will crash and I am quite confident that it will.