Other departments may be better, but avoid the Defined Benefits area
Pros
Receive bi-weekly paychecks... When you have down time due to testing environments not working, you have some time to build worthwhile skills for a new job.
Cons
Test environments are horrible - It is impossible to actually test. They are always changing code that breaks things with no accountability. Client Configurations are always getting messed up. It's impossible to test a product completely. Random error messages every day. It is extremely frustrating to be in this type of environment and you will be stuck waiting for dev/systems to fix issues on a daily basis. No advancement opportunities within DB - They will gladly allocate you to 120% because they like to "run lean", but they don't like to actually recognize employees monetarily. If you ever do get a promotion within the team, don't expect a good pay raise. Atrocious raises - With each year the raises are getting worse. After leading major projects and putting in a bunch of overtime, I was presented with a 1.5% raise. Others received worse percentages. Make sure you haggle on your starting salary, because you will be at that same pay until you get out of the department. No incentives - The only incentive is if you are hourly and can work overtime. Otherwise, you won't get recognized and there will be some time of excuse why raises/bonuses are low despite making record profits. I don't know many coworkers that want to stay in the department. Cheap - When they do encourage team bonding, they make it known that it is NOT funded and that you have to pay. Example - lunch outings with new teammates will be talked about for a week in advance and is highly encouraged to attend, but you will have to pay for yourself. When they used to acknowledge birthdays within the group, the cakes had to be bought personally by management without being able to expense them. Benefits - There are health benefits, but they have increased ~220% within 2 years. So you make less money by staying with the company. If you want any type of health reimbursement, you have to track your daily fitness/diet/etc; which they do reimburse $125/quarter, but it is very time consuming Menial tasks/job - The job itself is very menial. Other departments test a lot more that seem to overlap. You will not build any skills with this position. The hardest part of the job is understanding the complex systems, and when you have a good idea how they should function, they do not actually work. You spend most of your time writing defects. Each environment has limitations that seem to fluctuate per project. You will not build any skills that will help you develop professionally and could hinder future opportunities. Access issues - There are so many different systems that you need access to. You will not know that you need access to a specific table/environment/program/system until you lose it and can't access something. Then you have to wait days in order for them to give you access permissions again. You will be "voluntold" to participate in certain tasks that are not related to your role (or even department), have no prior knowledge of and are projected to "only take 4 hours", but they end up taking multiple weeks while you still have project work to maintain. That will be on addition to the 120% allocation that you already have for projects as well. The main application used in DB is 20+ years old. The code is basically all patchwork to fix problems on top of problems. There's "known issues" within certain functionality that isn't actually known among teams until a high-level dev informs the teams.
