Last year, in the comments to a blog post entitled Career Development at Microsoft: The internal interview process, there was the following exchange
The concept of "Permission to Interview" is probably the worst idea that Microsoft's HR group has come up with and this is after considering other questionable practices like The Curve & getting rid of the towel service. What happens when you tell your manager you want permission to leave the team? First of all, your manager has veto power over this decision or at the minimum can delay it for months at a time. Secondly, you're automatically labelled as a "bad" employee which sucks if you don't make it through the interviews on the team you want to transfer to or your opportunity to move is delayed for so long the other team finds someone else.
I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard someone say that they or someone they know is interviewing with Google or some other external company because they (i) don't want to risk asking for permission to interview or (ii) their management team has placed a temporary ban on permissions to interview. This means that the awesome thing about "permission to interview" is that it encourages
people to leave the company once they've decided to leave a team
because they are no longer a good fit or have a bad manager.
Why am I writing about this now? See the Mini-Microsoft post Microsoft Internal Transfers Just Got a Whole Lot Easier. Another Dilbert-style HR practice bites the dust. Lisa Brummel is slowly becoming my favorite Microsoft employee.