Microsoft

It's easy to understand where the business earns its income, which usually, but not always, translates to your specific job. There's no wondering where the company's revenue is coming from and how your product fits into that -- even if that means you're explicitly working on "table stakes" features or free services that add value for customers. The company cares about social and environmental issues, etc.

Microsoft is regarded as one of the "least evil" big tech companies to work for, but you "pay" for that by taking a lower salary. Benefits are great, but on par with other "big-tech" / "FAANG" companies. Generally, it values work-life balance.

The expectations can be high. Maintaining excellent quality of services, even at the limit of the team's scope, isn't enough to get promoted, especially if there's no work on your team to grab to grow your career and secure a promotion. This means you should always be looking at how your career can grow and whether to seek another team at some point if promotions become hard to come by.

Company culture doesn't necessarily work its way into all teams from the top down. Middle management not encouraging the ideal workplace culture can make it difficult to bring it from the bottom up, but many employees and managers close to the products care enough to overcome that hurdle at times.

When you work on a product that's a free service not specifically tied to a revenue stream, budgets are tight. If you want a quick path to promotion, find a team with broad customer scope where the line between customer revenue earned and the code you wrote is easy to draw. Other arguably equivalent "value adds" to the company's brands and services that don't directly drive profit are harder to sell your performance.

Work-life balance may suffer if you're on-call, depending on the team.

Why a company this big, with salaries so huge by comparison, penny-pinches on needed engineering hardware upgrades that would meaningfully improve engineer productivity is utterly beyond me. If you pay an engineer $150k ($600/day), a new $3000 computer costs a week's salary.

Many people I know have spent more time than that over the course of a year fighting with admins and budget-makers for new hardware because what they have is so miserable.

Just letting people have reasonably-timed hardware upgrades without the bureaucracy would pay for itself in time wasted, let alone morale issues saved.

My most reliable computer that wasn't "on loan" from an engineering lab, that is, my primary desk machine, was a year old when I started. It was 7 years old when I left. It needed to be replaced 4 years ago.

A $1.5k computer would have bought a better replacement computer. $2k would have bought an excellent, future-proofed computer.

This discussion doesn't even touch on the monitor situation. If you like 1440p or an ultra-wide-screen, bring your own.