VaultReports.com: New Microsoft Profile Reveals Company Worklife Secrets

Business Wire, April 22, 1999

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 22, 1999--

Everyone's curious about Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the world's leading software company, but no one has stepped inside the Redmond, Washington-based company's portals to give the comprehensive scoop on what it's really like to work at Microsoft. Until now, that is.

Vault Reports.com (http://www.VaultReports.com), the nation's leading source for "insider" information on America's top employers, has the answers. VaultReports.com has just released its latest version of the Microsoft Employer Profile, a 65-pp guide to the company, based on dozens of surveys with Microsoft employees.

The Vault Reports Microsoft Employer Profile is packed with revealing information, including:

-- Microsoft interviews are peppered with notoriously difficult

brainteasers, including the classic "Why is a manhole round?"

-- While actual salary is "below market," insiders are banking on

Microsoft's stock options. New MBA-level hires are given between

1800 to 2400 options - potentially worth around $200,000.

-- Work hours "often resemble college" where "you slack off after

finals and at the beginning of the semester, but work extra hard

right before finals." The joke around Microsoft? "Hours are

flexible - you can work any 12 hours of the day you want."

-- Microsoft gets 12,000 resumes each month and hires one out of

every 1000 applicants who send in a resume. Of MBAs hired on

campus since 1995, 99 percent are still with Microsoft.

-- Microsoft employees enjoy "a really good cafeteria that has

anything from junk food to gourmet" and "real offices, so much

nicer than rows of cubes and zero privacy." On the other hand,

only "full-timers get windows," excluding Microsoft's many temps.

Temps also miss out on stock options and deep discounts on

Microsoft products.

The Vault Reports Microsoft Employer Profile can be ordered by visiting: http://VaultReports.com/links/MSprofile. The newly released VaultReports Guide to the High Tech Industry can be ordered by visiting: http://www.vaultreports.com/vault/showdetl.cfm?did=8&Product_id=295&catid=39

To post messages in VaultReports.com's uncensored message boards on Microsoft, go to: http://VaultReports.com/links/MSsnapshot

Free Vault profiles of leading companies are also available in the careers areas of Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Excite (NASDAQ: XCIT).

About VaultReports.com

Last month,VaultReports.com was one of only two career web sites honored by Yahoo Internet Life as "Best of the Best Sites for 1998." Based in New York City, VaultReports.com publishes "insider" guides on over 1,500 companies and 50 industries. Vault also provides a proprietary service called VaultMatch (http://www.vaultreports.com/links/vaultmatch), a free online recruiting tool that matches young, professional job seekers with corporate employers and headhunters. Augmenting VaultMatch is Vault's Employee Message Boards (http://www.vaultreports.com/vstore/messageintro.cfm), a newly-introduced network of message boards where people can gossip about the work life at their companies. VaultReports.com was founded in 1996 by H.S. Hamadeh, Mark Oldman, and Samer Hamadeh, recent graduates of Stanford and Wharton.