Pros
I just want to start off by saying that I have been at the company from March 2019 to late January 2021 (before and after pandemic) and so this is somewhat of a late review but I still wanted to write one for the longest time. - Coworkers: The guys that work there are till this day really good friends of mine and although I wasn't the most extroverted I bonded with most if not all of them, they are some of the funniest guys I've met. And getting lunch together or playing billiards/nintendo switch (smash ultimate) was always the highlight of my day. Also this was the main reason why I stayed for as long as I did. - Snacks/Break lounge: I was actually the snack guy for a bit when we were in office and so it was cool choosing/budgeting the snacks to the last cent. Free snacks is always a plus. - Amount of resources to learn/grow: I think this part is heavily underlooked here. This company offers so much value its ridiculous in my opinion, to see some of the reviews here. You can legit start with 0 knowledge of QA or programming and learn ON THE JOB and get paid for it. From my experience, although I have a CS background, I had little to no QA experience but I learned both Front-end and Back-end testing (manual and automation - Java/Python). You get exposed to industry standard tools such as Selenium, Appium (if your project is mobile), TestRails, Jira, Postman/Swagger API, Saucelabs etc as well as various frameworks/concepts such as Gherkin/Cucumber, Page object models, locators (Xpaths & CSS selectors) etc. Most if not all of these are documented on their wiki, although some of it might be hidden in the Business partner pages. - VPs: I feel like these guys do not get enough credit here in the reviews. They have all been somewhat of a mentor for me and have helped me a countless number of times. If you ever need help with anything technical and your peers/google doesn't help, don't feel intimidated to ask them for guidance.
Cons
- Biggest one is obviously salary. It's true the pay is extremely low compared to Industry standard but are you really going to complain about that when you suck at coding and have 0 QA experience? If you applied to this job, that means you are most likely trying to get your foot out of the door and build experience. You learn so much here IF you take advantage of their resources and in my opinion that is much more valuable than pay because this is what leads you to landing higher paying jobs. I left SQA to work at Blizzard Entertainment but then moved on to another job as an SDET II and am now making 110k. Take advantage of their resources! - Constantly changing projects: Not sure if this is a con but it could be for some people because you have to learn new domain knowledge and adjust in a somewhat fast paced environment. However, this does expose you to new tools and does give you more experience with what it's like in working with different teams. Whether it is your pods or if you're onsite, a new dev team, you learn a lot about the SDLC and also how you approach situations with "bad" teammates which will help you in interviews for future jobs. - Late reviews/Pay raises: All of my reviews got delayed and so that was unfortunate at the time but I know some guys waited several months longer than me so I shouldn't complain. As for pay increase, although this can be a touchy subject, I was pretty open about it. My first jump was from 33k to 38k and then to 50k which was much higher than my peers but was still laughable. - Acknowledgement/Bonuses: The idea of rewarding a good employee is great; however, SQA does this pretty poorly. And I don't want to sound cocky but I did receive the SQA Technical Achievement award but whenever they gave a bonus it's literally just an extra day's worth of pay or a gift card. I actually only received this once but I felt I excelled at my job. I also had gone out of my way very frequently to help other pods with their automation; however, it did feel like it went unnoticed most of the time. - PDCI: For the guys that are new and have no idea what this is, it is essentially their in house tool for a lot of things such as the requests/tickets you will create and work on as well as to build test cases that can be synced to your automation. I know they were building PDCI 2.0 at the time that I left and so I really hope they fixed all of the inconveniences and bugs of its predecessor. - George: To be honest, I liked George to an extent. I get it, he can micromanage and be rude at times but I respected him. He can be intimidating and you'll know if he's around when the atmosphere shifts. He also does show favoritism and can be uptight at times.