Meanwhile when I was at another company we would get a weekly new hire post with very high pedigree from other FAANGs. And with that we got a lot of industry leading ideas by osmosis that you don't see Azure getting.
To be fair though I think Microsoft has decided they are fine with rank and file being mediocre. I don’t know how interested they are in competing for top talent except for at the top.
The deal used to be a lower cost of living in a major coastal city, an amazing campus (it is seriously lovely), every engineer had their own office, serious job security, and an unbelievable health care plan.
Seattle exploded in price, they moved to open offices, Microsoft started doing mass layoffs, and they gutted the healthcare plan (by the time I left the main plan on offer was a high deductible with a miserable prescription formulary).
Hard to attract talent when there is no big differentiator.
Of course in the 90s the deal was work there 10 years retire a millionaire. Easy to attract talent when that is the offer ...
Before the days of title inflation across the industry, a a Principal at Microsoft was a rare thing. When I was there, the ratio was maybe 1 principal for every 30 developers. Principals were looked up to, had decades of experience, and knew their shit really well. They were the big guns you called in to fix things when the shit really hit the fan, or when no one else could figure out what was going on.