Brilliant Career Path For Testers

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The importance of a career ladder

You should want your employees, all of them, to imagine a future for themselves in the company that benefits them (motivates them to grow) and benefits the company. A well-defined career ladder includes a description of what movement to senior positions looks like for both the company and for the employee. When the career ladder is poorly defined, people will abandon their roles out of frustration, seeking more rewarding and lucrative options. The company suffers from this exodus. When it is well defined, you retain top skills and talent to tackle difficult problems the company needs to solve.

The SDET career ladder redefined at Microsoft

Sometime after 2000 (I forget the exact year) Microsoft redefined its career ladder for testers, and the change was brilliant. They hired a consultant to guide the redefine. Testing leadership in the company were involved. There was a lot of thought and consideration that went into it.

What they came up with followed the same track as the developers. Not word for word, and not by making every tester a product developer (that came probably a decade later). Instead they redefined it by following the same themes of how one increases impact over time. It is ironic that it took so long and so much work to realize the answer was already in front of them, but sometimes it takes a journey of sorts to see you already know what to do. Kind of like the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy realizes she had the power to return home all along. She had to go through her adventure and dispense with a witch for her to understand it.

The aligned career ladder

The new career ladder imagined four main bands or stages in an engineer’s career:

ENG 1, ENG 2, Senior ENG, Principal ENG

The ENG labels would change based on discipline, so SDET, SDE, etc.

Above Principal is Partner, but Microsoft tends to treat that role as a special case and leaves the definition more open ended. Promotion to Partner is a more infrequent event that takes far more consideration by leaders higher up. The Principal band also spans more career levels (a numerical system that defines compensation bands) than the prior bands, so expectation to promote beyond Principal diminishes, seeing most people that acheive Principal stay there.

The expectation at each level was as follows:

ENG 1: initially learning how to do the job, quickly expected to demonstrate ability to own their area and act independently, learning how to define a solution for ambiguous problems

ENG 2: owning areas of larger difficulty and scope, actively involved mentoring and guiding others, expected to handle ambiguity

Senior ENG: increased difficulty and scope, owning features and solve problems used by or affecting other engineers, mentoring and guiding others a base expectation

Principal: solving problems that span the whole team, multiple teams, perhaps whole division or department, or that are of technically deep and demanding of specialized expertise and skills. Defining and inventing standards and practices for the group.

The key thing that defined movement up the ladder was impact and scope. Problems that affected more and more of the business or product, problems that affected other engineers. Ability to handle ambiguity increases up the ladder, to the point where Senior and Principal engineers are expected to design the answers to large ambiguous problems affecting the product and rest of the team.

The company defined the entry point for all new engineers as ENG 1. Whether someone was in testing or development or program management did not matter. They were all on the same equal footing in terms of how their career began and progressed.

Implementation of the career ladder

Actual alignment of testers with developer took a while because prior to the ladder definition testers had been hired at a lower level and there was a career cap for individual contributors in test that ended their ability to promote as an individual contributor a full one to two bands lower than developers. The effect was that at time of implementation of new career ladder, most testers were in the SDET1 and SDET2 range, with a few Senior and no Principal testers. At the same time, the bulk of developers were in the Sendior SDE band, with a large number of individual contributor developers in the principal band.

Over the span of several years, the tester upper bands started to fill out seening more and more SDETs promote into Senior SDET, and then likewise to Principal SDET. It was slow, but it was happening.

Eventually, in 2014, Microsoft aligned the SDET and SDE roles into a single role, SWE, and the alignment of ladders between the two roles was moot. The merits of that shift are discussion for another article, but before the unification, the career ladder Microsoft finally built for their testers was working well.