[hyperrail]

An advantage of working at Microsoft that only other huge tech companies can match is that you'll get the chance to interact with many different people, some of whom will inspire outright hero worship among you and your direct coworkers. Those interactions could be in email discussions (having to send endless emails to random people or unarchived mailing lists to get things done or find things out is the curse of Microsoft life), or in API review meetings, or just water cooler talk.

Getting the chance to work with people like that was one of the highlights of my Microsoft career. Some of them are famous or semi-famous outside Microsoft, like David Cutler (mentioned repeatedly in this comment thread), while others are not known outside MSFT at all but arguably should be, while others are respected among a small geeky community (I'm thinking here of 2 Linux kernel subsystem maintainers who joined MSFT after making their names in Linux, and continue Linux work today). If making those connections is something you'd want to do as well, I'd definitely see that as a big plus of an MSFT job.