{"id":163,"date":"2010-07-07T16:16:43","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T23:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=163"},"modified":"2010-07-07T16:16:43","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T23:16:43","slug":"careers-in-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/careers-in-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Careers in Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d like to elaborate on something from a previous post on SDETs at Microsoft<\/a>. One thing that is perhaps a bit different about the test role at Microsoft is its tie to the career path<\/em>. We are, for better or worse, big believers in career growth and expect growth in scope and impact from all<\/u> of our testers.<\/p>\n

Eric, a former manager of mine has a nice post on our \u201ccareer stages\u201d in this blog post<\/a>. His post is on SDEs, but it applies to SDETs for the most part. Eric\u2019s descriptions are wonderful, and well written. At risk of being a copy cat blogger, however, I\u2019m going to offer a sentence or two of commentary on the non-manager SDET career stages at Microsoft.<\/p>\n

SDET<\/strong> \u2013 This is where most of our testers start, and where you figure out how to do your job, and do it well. This stage is about learning the trade (tools, practices, dynamics, etc.). You won\u2019t make it out of this stage just by being a fantastic tester \u2013 everyone<\/em> in this stage is a fantastic tester. <\/p>\n

SDET II<\/strong> \u2013 At this stage, the big thing is independence \u2013 SDET \u201c2s\u201d get stuff done, and don\u2019t get stuck \u2013 in fact, they don\u2019t let <\/em>themselves get stuck. At this stage, testers also start to get their eyes of the immediate tasks at hand more often and think a bit about the future of their org. They have influence in their team, and often accomplish significant tasks that impact their entire org.<\/p>\n

Senior SDET<\/strong> \u2013 Leadership is expected at this stage. It can be technical leadership or strategic influence \u2013 but the big point is that you have a huge amount of influence and impact on your entire team (with occasional forays into impact across your organization). For a longer explanation, please meet Alecha, Sanjay, Jodi and Kaz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Principal SDET<\/strong> \u2013 SDETs at this level are expected to have influence and impact across their group (i.e. well beyond the testers that work in their own managers organization). We don\u2019t have personas for this level shared externally yet, but if you think of the gang of four above with a much wider scope of impact, you\u2019ll be close.<\/p>\n

Partner SDET<\/strong> \u2013 This is scope of impact ratcheted up to 11. These folks leaders across an entire division (remember, that we\u2019re talking about leadership \u2013 not management). They often make decisions that can save millions of dollars (and do so with consistency and confidence). Again \u2013 we have no personas for these folks, but just think of the same gang of four leading successfully across an entire division.<\/p>\n

Internally, we have career stage profiles that define a lot more about these roles (some examples are in chapter 2 of hwtsam<\/a>). The one bit of possible weirdness with the big emphasis on career paths is that we expect everyone to grow to at least Senior, and I worry sometimes that there are fantastically awesome wonderful super-testers who just aren\u2019t capable of leadership at the Senior level. As I think about it though, I wonder if I (we?) just need a broader view of what leadership in testing really is. Right now, we have a relatively small percentage of folks at Senior+ levels, so I may be looking at this through eyes stuck on the small population of people currently \u201cleading\u201d at those levels.<\/p>\n

Just hoping to clear up some mysteries \u2013 hope you find this helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d like to elaborate on something from a previous post on SDETs at Microsoft. One thing that is perhaps a bit different about the test role at Microsoft is its tie to the career path. We are, for better or worse, big believers in career growth and expect growth in scope and impact from all…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}