They can hardly be blamed for not wanting to go live in rainy Seattle, work under someone as uninspiring as Steve Ballmer, and put up with awful stack ranking BS.
Have Microsoft relocate you, wait a year for your relo payback contract to expire, quit.
Or you could find a position at the many Seattle-area employers willing to relocate you: Google, Adobe, Boeing, Valve, a whole grip of game companies. The world, as it were, is your oyster.
A few of my friends here in Seattle call Amazon the "travel agent for developers" because so many people relocate to Seattle to work for Amazon and leave immediately after they no longer have to pay back their moving expenses.
The stack ranking BS is (allegedly) a thing of the past, and the rain in Seattle is overblown. There are plenty of US cities that get more rain than Seattle.
I won't challenge your opinion about Steve Ballmer, though.
At 37 inches of rain per year, it's not a particularly high volume of rain; it's just spread out over a lot of days. San Francisco is down at 63 rainy days and 20 inches per year, for comparison.
I don't consider that a fair assessment, as a snowy day is a very different thing from a rainy day. Seattle gets maybe a handful of snowy days a year, and never gets punishingly hot/humid like some cities do.
