Company: Microsoft
Date: 2011-03-17
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Investment banking workload, software engineer pay scale, definitely not worthy
Pros: 1. Low cost of living
2. Big name company
3. Close to the newest tech trend
4. Well defined career path
Cons: Traditionally the worklife in Microsoft teams are 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 workload here as SDET is horrible. I often work 75+ hours a week in order to complete all the works. Not only me but I also hear complaints from colleagues in the same team about the workload. The workload comes in the following ways:
1. 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 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.
2. On-demand tasks: when you are signed on to work on a 1 month long project that needs 8 hours dedicated time each day, the management will try to randomly give instruction 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.
3. Incidents: you need to take care of incidents, such as cluster down or test reported failures. Which could take 4 hours for each incident. At the time you signed-up to work on a 8 hours-day pre-planned project. 
4. 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. 
5. Code changes everywhere: as the Cloud related project is fast growing, all the components were changing, and your existing code can be broken by other people anytime. Then you need to take care of that. 

Besides the workload, also there is issue in:
1. No core competency developed in SDET job role: even with such long hours daily working time, most things I do are low level: writing straght-forward-logic C# code (like scripts), take care of some config text files, copy-paste test failures' stack traces, start test runs, spend 5 hours to find out a way to hack the dev component to test something they didn't provide interface. I believe I won't be able to find another job after doing things like for 3 more years. 
2. The pay scale is definitely not worthy for this workload. I of heard people in Amazon complaining their workload due to nature of online services (fast pace, incidents, etc), but their pay is 30% higher. I think now I am doing the same amount of work as they, as at substantially lower salary.