What's a Good Company?

Since I was made manager some years back, I try my best to make things better for my staff, encouraging them to grow, trying to give them constructive feedback and generally treating them the way I thought they would like to be treated. At times, what I do seem to contradict what the company and the HR department have on mind, and there's resentment from both myself and the staff.

In my new job, no one really reports to me, and the work is about 70% technical, so these issues sort of dropped out of my mind, until a recent article in BusinessWeek brought me to Mini Microsoft, a blog by an anonymous Microsoft employee who has become a celebrity of sorts for his rants about how things are being run at Microsoft. It is interesting that such a successful company as Microsoft also faces the issues that I used to agonize over in my previous job.