Microsoft Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) II reviews

There is a tradition of open discussion, and your ideas can get heard - no matter what your position in the organization. The other side of this is the debate never stops, so decisions are rarely explicit, and often not completely followed. This causes a good deal of chaos for employees and for customers. People are willing to collaborate when invited, but there's not a great culture of inviting collaboration. Many times I found engineers view reinventing on their own as easier alternative to finding the right people to collaborate with and starting a dialog. Similarly, people have their own ideas about priorities, and aren't always willing to listen or collaborate on aligning priorities. Often teams build what they want to build rather than figure out what customers need and how to work with other teams to deliver that. There is a culture of only solving problems by programming. I saw problems that were non-programming problems get ignored, or addressed as if they were programming problems. Many of the leaders are engineers who understand the engineering and processes very well, but are less effective as leaders of people. There is often an arrogant attitude that we know this business and what's needed better than our competitors or users.

Unless your project is high priority, it's hard to make an impact. And most of the people that I worked with have families to take care, so there is really no social with your coworkers in my case. When I first started I thought I could make a different, but looking back, I barely scratched the surface.