Comment by darthwalsh

I was there when the SDET role was eliminated.

Our team of 8 SDE and 5 SDET became a team of 8 devs who also owned tons of QA frameworks. It was awful, except each tiny we deleted a test suite for not being valuable; that was awesome!

If the Azure org was flooded with senior engineers who did not have senior-level experience architecting production software... That explains a lot.