[ineedasername]

If you're miserable in your job now then switching seems like there's lots of upside and only a little downside (it could potentially be worse than current).

The main thing I'd consider in this is the work/life balance. Will it allow the same stellar level of that? People vary in their priorities. For some it's interesting/fun problems to solve, for some it's impact, but for me it's work/life balance, presuming of course that the work side isn't a hateful stressfest. No amount of remote work or flex schedule will make up for absolutely hellish work environment, and I had something like that once. (I ended up taking a 30% pay cut that I could just barely afford and got the heck out)

So I'm sorry that I can't speak to the kernel work itself, but instead the framework for making the decision. If the work/life balance will remain constant then you're only risking the possibility that the work won't be any better, and hopefully no worse. If the work/life balance for the new job is also uncertain then (for me) that would be a bigger risk consideration.

Finally, you should consider the worst case scenario: The work is worse, the work/life balance is also worse. How easily can you shift to something better? If you have the chops to work on the Windows kernel then I'd wager that if you hit the worst case scenario you could get out of it without too much trouble, but you're the only one who knows whether or not that's true.

Best of luck to you, sláinte, and may the wind be always at your back.

[ForgottenEnmity]

Is work/life balance a US thing? In my country, for example, the employer can't easily make you work for longer than 8 hours per day, and even then there are big big compensations like extra payment with time off, restrictions on how much overtime per year is allowed and so on. So when people speak of a bad life/work balance, how does that happen in the first place?

[hyperrail]

Salaried office workers receive far poorer wage and hour protections in the U.S. than you may be used to. Overtime above 40 hours per week is often unpaid, as is the case at Microsoft, and no amount of paid vacation is guaranteed by law. (Workers paid hourly do get overtime pay at 1.5 times the normal wage or higher.)

Microsoft's work/life balance is good in my experience; managers respect your time, product deadlines rarely or never cause long-hour rushes, and if your role lacks an on-call rotation then you won't be woken up in the middle of the night. But other companies may be far worse, and Microsoft is big enough that one person's experience never truly generalizes.

For time off in particular, as of my last experience 2 years ago, MSFT's US policy on paid time off was stingy by American tech company standards:

* There is no scheduled period of the year where everyone gets paid time off. (LinkedIn has 2 such weeks a year but it manages its HR independently of the rest of Microsoft.)

* You accumulate 3 weeks of vacation PTO per year of work for your first 6 years at the company, then 4 weeks per year for years 7-12, then 5 weeks per year for years 13+.

* Unused vacation days expire at the end of the calendar year following the calendar year in which you accumulated them.

* When you leave the company, you get a "vacation cash-out:" you are paid a lump sum equal to all your unused, unexpired vacation days.

* In addition to vacation, each calendar year you get 2 weeks of paid sick leave and 2 "floating holidays" to use like vacation days.

For comparison, at Google you accumulate 4 weeks of vacation per year starting just in year 2, while at Netflix and many smaller companies you get unlimited vacation at the cost of no cash-out.

In practice, there is more leeway at Microsoft on PTO than this policy allows. Even when I had an otherwise poor relationship with my manager, they still looked the other way when I went on Christmas/New Year's week vacation without filing an absence request or using up my vacation days. And I have heard of divisions where after a particularly stressful and overtime-heavy year, the division Vice President told everyone to take such an off-the-books holiday vacation.

[ForgottenEnmity]

Appreciate the info, thank you.