Yes, absolutely. Once you stop getting promoted at Microsoft, management is conditioned to look at you as dead wood. I was there for nearly 10 years and had good coaching through 5 promotions. One of the things that was kind of nice about the system is that my managers were always really good at spelling out exactly what was going to be expected of me in order to reach the next level. Unfortunately, the requirements just keep ratcheting up, and I got to the point where what my manager laid out as the next set of requirements was simply never going to happen. I wasn't interested in putting in ever-increasing effort and taking on ever-increasing responsibilities. This is when he explained to me that if you just decide to be happy where you are, Microsoft basically starts to lose interest in you and you get the shaft in the stack-ranking. So I left.