Microsoft has a great work-life balance most of the time. The writer of the article was in DX, which used to be an evangelist group, and they were one of the unlucky groups due to travel and preparing for events.
DX has now become CSE (Commercial Software Engineering) and instead of evangelizing, they now mainly write code (with some exceptions). One group in CSE works with customers on short-term hacks which span a couple of days, and another group works on long-term projects alongside engineers at external companies, helping them build cloud solutions.
These jobs do have travel, but it is not very much since remotely working with customers is a viable option. There is also a strong focus on ensuring they don’t work or travel too much because no one wants to burn out engineers.
DX has now become CSE (Commercial Software Engineering) and instead of evangelizing, they now mainly write code (with some exceptions). One group in CSE works with customers on short-term hacks which span a couple of days, and another group works on long-term projects alongside engineers at external companies, helping them build cloud solutions.
These jobs do have travel, but it is not very much since remotely working with customers is a viable option. There is also a strong focus on ensuring they don’t work or travel too much because no one wants to burn out engineers.
CSE is actually a really cool org at Microsoft, and you can see some of the stuff they work on here: https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/