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.