ServiceNow

I was part of the platform infra automation QE testing team.

There are no benefits to being in the team; it's a production support team with 24/7 working expectations.

The company is good, but my team's working environment is very unhealthy. I had to leave within six months due to the poor working style of the team.

The project is a disorganized nightmare without any clear, explainable process, an impractical team structure, and unrealistic expectations. There is no apparent direction at the leadership level, and every trivial thing seems to become a priority at once, creating panic in the team.

During my tenure here, it was very difficult for me to identify if I was working in an engineering team or a support team. Maybe engineering and support are treated as the same thing here, which can be used interchangeably as per convenience. From my perspective, it's just a split between too many tiny teams that just pass the buck when something is broken and get territorial when someone takes action in their area.

Besides weekly task allocation and some internal meetings, the team's process is practically non-existent. I hardly have any regular talks with any PMs/BAs, architects, or developers for the testing tasks I work upon. However, I always leave questions on the team's channel during the day, which are answered when I am asleep at night, so that I can again ask follow-up questions the next day. This cycle of questions and answers is called collaboration here.

I have a direct manager and a dotted line manager to demonstrate my ability to work and juggle with multiple priorities at the same time and to degrade my work-life balance in that process. To add to the misery, there are people at the management level who are clueless about what QE is about, maybe because they don’t have any ground-level reality or any first-hand working experience in the QE domain.

I really hope that people without any experience in the QE domain could be identified and given some other opportunity based on their past domain experience so that they can add value and create impact in the company’s growth journey.