Microsoft Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) reviews

Have to deal with a lot of politics where often times the person doing the hard work doesn't get the credit he or she deserves. You're in a massive company, with labrynthine org charts. Sometimes a very cool idea gets shot down by legal. These ideas may not be shot down in other companies but since Microsoft has been burned badly by the antitrust case, they're extra careful.

The company is not truly invested in growing employees to be what they want. Rather, they want to grow us to be more efficient where we currently are. For example, there is a long dry gulch between the the SDET and SDE roles. Even though some people have made the transition successfully, there is active discouragement by test leadership when attempting to make this transition. The company is lost trying to make money and has become scared to do anything innovative. The coolest products are handcuffed to profitability expectations before the idea is even baked, causing the best ideas to never bubble to the top. Since there is such a high technical bar, incompetence moves into leaderships to survive, which leads to the laziest workers in the middle. The review process is a joke, can you say bell curve?