CareerCup

Hi Guys,

I am an SDET at Microsoft. My team is shifting focus from the traditional SDET job definition to something that would result in less coding and more manual testing and data analysis. I have always enjoyed the coding aspect of my job and now I've decided to make a move to a position where I can continue to do that. My goal is to move to a developer position. What I mean by that is something that is coding intensive than what I would do in the future in this team.

I am interviewing internally at MS for developer positions and I applied at Google for an SET position as well. I was offered the TE(Test Engineer) position instead of the SET position. Now here within MS, I am pretty sure I will get into a developer position somewhere or the other if I keep trying even though I do not have a lot of hardcore dev experience. I want to move to a dev position because I want to grow in my career as a developer and not "try" other stuff anymore.

Google told me that if I take up SET and SWE projects as a part of my work and display proficiency, I would be able to switch to those disciplines in 18 months or 2 years.

My question is, do you think it's worth going to Google as a TE and spending all that time just to reach a stage where I would be eligible for consideration to move to an SET/SWE position or do you think I should just grab an MS dev role if I get it and jump into it and put all the hard work into that? What are the pros and cons of taking either of these steps?

I would really appreciate some help deciding here. And please ask me any questions that would help you help me. Again, I am not a person with a hardcore dev background, but I am smart, hard working and rarely make the same mistakes twice. So, I think I can learn and grow in any position. But I'd also appreciate you giving it to me straight.

Thanks!
Pretentious Bastard