Company: Microsoft
Date: 2010-01-13
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Avoid being SDET if you can
Pros: Microsoft is a great place to learn technical skills and how huge software project are run (it is not as organized and deterministic as you may think)
The Benefits are great specially medical insurance
Cons: The review system depends on power balance between the different managers. So it is very easy to get your promotion delayed if you have weak manager.
Manual Testers (Test Engineer Role) has been eliminated from most parts of the company so SDETs have to balance writing automation and doing manual type testing. This cause many SDETs to compromise in one of them to get to the other which cause bad bugs to slip and low quality automation code.
The turn over rate in Test is so high so you always has more work than what you can do.