I mean, in terms of projects it looks like most of interesting stuff is in US. In Europe they have app dynamic, office 365, teams, Skype. Where is Halo done? Where is Xbox, Cortana, all the fun stuff done?
Yes unfortunately. All my friends in different locations say the same. Come to Redmond
Is this a side effect of the European concept of work life balance?
No, it's a side effect of Europe being slow and companies not wanting to invest when the majority of workers are in the US. It takes time to to build meaningful projects outside of headquarters and I'm sure there are regulations/laws that make it unappealing. Honestly when I was in Europe I saw way more folks burned out and unhappy. I'm in NA now and it's great.
I was in Microsoft Europe. Yes, most of the projects suck. I think they have gaming related (Havok?) Stuff in Dublin and Germany but I still feel like the majority of cool stuff happens in Redmond. Xbox, DirectX, Windows are all in the US. Microsoft Research is an outlier but it's very research focused, not a normal SWE job.