Microsoft

1. Low cost of living
2. Big name company
3. Close to the newest tech trend
4. Well-defined career path

Traditionally, the work-life in Microsoft teams is known to be relaxed and laid back. But I work in one of the new Cloud-computing related teams who tries to put new services online, and the workload here as an SDET is horrible.

I often work 75+ hours a week in order to complete all the work. Not only me, but I also hear complaints from colleagues in the same team about the workload. The workload comes in the following ways:

• Scheduling: The management will try to "persuade" you to compress the schedule into what fits their schedule needs, ignoring the true task time costs and all the uncertain factors that could delay the schedule. Once you sign on to that schedule, all factors that drag you down need to be paid from your own pocket – your personal time. By forcing you to commit to such scheduling, they implicitly put you to work long hours.
• On-demand tasks: When you are signed on to work on a 1-month long project that needs 8 hours of dedicated time each day, the management will try to randomly give instructions to you to take care of some random tasks, which could take 3 hours a day. At the same time, they track your progress on the scheduled task.
• Incidents: You need to take care of incidents, such as cluster downs or test-reported failures, which could take 4 hours for each incident, at the time you signed up to work on an 8-hours-day pre-planned project.
• You can get promoted only if you work extra time: The management will assign you with all those routine tasks that would already take you 10+ hours a day. For promotion, as they said, you need to do something beyond routine that would impress them. That means you find another project besides your already long-hours routine tasks to get recognized.
• Code changes everywhere: As the Cloud-related project is fast-growing, all the components are changing, and your existing code can be broken by other people anytime. Then you need to take care of that.

Besides the workload, there is also an issue in:

• No core competency developed in the SDET job role: Even with such long hours daily working time, most things I do are low-level: writing straight-forward-logic C# code (like scripts), taking care of some config text files, copy-pasting test failures' stack traces, starting test runs, and spending 5 hours to find out a way to hack the dev component to test something they didn't provide an interface for. I believe I won't be able to find another job after doing things like this for 3 more years.
• The pay scale is definitely not worthy for this workload. I have heard people in Amazon complaining about their workload due to the nature of online services (fast pace, incidents, etc.), but their pay is 30% higher. I think I am now doing the same amount of work as they, but at a substantially lower salary.