The downside is you have to put up with Microsoft's ineptitude. I was on a Microsoft project for about 6 months and it was a terrible experience. Everyone was out for themselves, asking questions was treated as an annoyance. Condescension at every turn. It was a small team and perhaps not representative of all of Microsoft, but it was a bad enough experience that I'd never consider working there in any capacity.

My experience was the opposite. I was surrounded by veritable gods of the industry but you wouldn't know it in-person; I even shared a hallway with at least 2 people who had their own Wikipedia articles.

Yes, I had a bad case of imposter syndrome too.

Microsoft is a massive company. Each org and team are very different. I worked there for a few years and my team was extremely old school (waterfall, no automation, all manual QA, heavy upfront planning, etc) while I had friends in other parts of the company where it was pretty much the exact opposite. The same can be said about talent density, innovation, etc.

> are expected to reach Level 60 within 2 years or they're automatically out-the-door

That part isn't true. Some people stay at L59 for much longer and there isn't any "automatic out", at least in the US.