Microsoft's work/life balance is good in my experience; managers respect your time, product deadlines rarely or never cause long-hour rushes, and if your role lacks an on-call rotation then you won't be woken up in the middle of the night. But other companies may be far worse, and Microsoft is big enough that one person's experience never truly generalizes.
For time off in particular, as of my last experience 2 years ago, MSFT's US policy on paid time off was stingy by American tech company standards:
* There is no scheduled period of the year where everyone gets paid time off. (LinkedIn has 2 such weeks a year but it manages its HR independently of the rest of Microsoft.)
* You accumulate 3 weeks of vacation PTO per year of work for your first 6 years at the company, then 4 weeks per year for years 7-12, then 5 weeks per year for years 13+.
* Unused vacation days expire at the end of the calendar year following the calendar year in which you accumulated them.
* When you leave the company, you get a "vacation cash-out:" you are paid a lump sum equal to all your unused, unexpired vacation days.
* In addition to vacation, each calendar year you get 2 weeks of paid sick leave and 2 "floating holidays" to use like vacation days.
For comparison, at Google you accumulate 4 weeks of vacation per year starting just in year 2, while at Netflix and many smaller companies you get unlimited vacation at the cost of no cash-out.
In practice, there is more leeway at Microsoft on PTO than this policy allows. Even when I had an otherwise poor relationship with my manager, they still looked the other way when I went on Christmas/New Year's week vacation without filing an absence request or using up my vacation days. And I have heard of divisions where after a particularly stressful and overtime-heavy year, the division Vice President told everyone to take such an off-the-books holiday vacation.