I tend to agree with your post as I have been through what you are going through. I still regret taking the SDET role. In general SDETs do a lot of janitor kind of work. Cleaning up after the Devs and PMs. At the end of the day what everyone cares is that you have tested everything and not how you do it. I used to do a lot of system admin kind of work i.e. setting up machines, installing OS, running scripts, running existing test suites, etc. instead of writing new tests or new test frameworks. I am afraid this will take a long time to change. The only thing we can do now is move away from the SDET role. I can't guarantee if it'll be any better but it won't be as worse as being an SDET.
I spent 3 years as an sdet; loved it! Know for sure that my dev skills were superior to the senior sde's. know this coz I wrote their code on more than one occasion.
Been at msft twice - first team was shit, second was awesome. Impossible to make blanket statements, the org is just too big.
