[Ombudsman]

Bad stuff:

1. There will be a lot of infrastructure complexity in the kernel, just prepare yourself for that. Even worse bugs! You'll be fixing a lot of bugs, or looking at a lot of bugs, and most of these bugs are from other teams who are interacting with your component! Just order a copy of Windows Internals and get yourself familiar with how thing work.

2. Old ass engineering systems. Just as the interviewers said you will spend a lot of your time waiting for Windows builds.

Good stuff:

1. Work life balance is amazing actually. Most of the time there's very little pressure for you to get work done, as long as you're doing something no one really bothers you.

2. Since you said you hate designing systems, good news, everything has been designed for you! Your, job will mostly be implementing new features for a component.

3. Windbg is actually great and I will die on this hill. You might have to print some debug logs but you won't be looking at metrics because there's whole teams dedicated to doing that stuff. There's also tools which quickly spin up VMs for you to do some live kernel debugging.

Meh stuff:

1. The pay, could be better. That might change soon though.

[gavinray]

  >  Windbg is actually great and I will die on this hill.

Someone convinced me to try Windbg Preview about 2 years ago and I was in awe. I too will now die on the hill that it's an incredible cross-language debugger capable of a lot more than that.

[asveikau]

> Windbg is actually great and I will die on this hill

Came here to say this. (Actually kd, but lots of overlap.)

[criddell]

How did you learn it? I use it occasionally to debug memory dumps after an application crash but I know that WinDbg can do so much more than show me the stack just as the application crashed.

[asveikau]

I learned it at Microsoft. When debugging issues in Windows, it was pretty common to leave a remote server open and pass it around among colleagues to find the right person who knows what code is failing. You could see what the remote party was typing and doing. It was a pretty social way to learn your way around.

[matthewfcarlson]

This comment is something that matches my experience. My new company tends to have worse work life balance but higher pay. It’s a trade off. I think the best play is join microsoft and leave after the nice sign off bonus all vests. I can’t complain about the ride, just the drop at the end.