Comment by _heimdall

I started my career as an SDET at Microsoft. Yes its correct they no longer have test automation engineers, but I never felt the org I was in was useless or that people were too narrowly focused.

Maybe it was the org we were in, Office could have been different, but our challenge was usually wanting more people on the team to help spread the load rather than less.

And for what its worth, I didn't intend to go into test at the time but it was a great place for me to start. I picked up a habit of writing production code in more testable ways, considering edge cases, implementing observability, etc. Those skills are often picked up along the way but it definitely helped me out starting with a much stronger basis of those skills.