Microsoft

• Only one of the big tech companies that isn't embroiled in controversy for the kind of harm being done to society, being anti-competitive, having its users be the product, or being investigated by Congress.
• Really took care of employees during COVID-19. For example, cafe staff were still paid as though they were working full time, even though the campus was closed.
• Awesome mission and probably the most mature culture.
• Relatively high concentration of talent. You can easily find role models.
• Work has humongous impact that generally improves productivity, empowers people and organizations, and improves lives. And because the company does so much open source or uses so much open source, a lot of the work you do has high visibility. Imagine being a VS Code engineer...
• Culture.
• The company takes work-life balance and running enduring, sustainable teams very seriously.

• It is a huge company, so there will be some teams that are not as well run, and some teams where there's unfortunately a higher than normal concentration of "old mindset" people.

• Microsoft does not pay the best out there. If you're optimizing for direct compensation, this might not be the place for you. Instead, it generally looks at the overall "deal".

• It's a great place to "grow up" and build a career, but being loyal generally also means that not only are you not super well paid to begin with, the rate at which your compensation adjusts naturally also does not keep pace if you were to jump between companies.

Ironically, I don't think there is anything special I can give advice on.

One of the great things Microsoft does is that it actually cares about employee opinions and has great internal feedback mechanisms.

Though it's not always super apparent what the company is doing w.r.t. feedback, esp. with regards to compensation, on a whole, the company itself actually exhibits a growth mindset :)