When I first joined Microsoft as an SDET back in 2006, the culture was such (at least in my org) that any SDET could halt shipping.
A bit less than a year out of college I found a pretty significant bug in the compiler (I forget the bug! I do remember the one major bug I let slip out into a release though) well after everything had been signed off on. I brought it up in the team meeting and the principle dev asked me directly "Do you think we should cancel the release to fix this bug?" I wasn't sure of myself and he told me that "it's your call", and I said that yeah, we should fix the bug.
For anyone under 35 who is confused by this, was before releases were rolling and shipped online. When Microsoft released a major version back then, it had a (IIRC) ~10 year support contract attached to it (and if you found a bug and were on a good enough of a support contract, the dev team would develop a custom patch for you to fix a bug in a 9 year 6 month old release!), and a lot of gears were set in motion to make a release happen.
This was the norm at Microsoft for a long time. I was originally attracted to the SDET role because they were the last defender of the customer experience, they were the engineers who held the line on quality. The entire industry is worse off for the SDET role having been eliminated across all major software companies.
A bit less than a year out of college I found a pretty significant bug in the compiler (I forget the bug! I do remember the one major bug I let slip out into a release though) well after everything had been signed off on. I brought it up in the team meeting and the principle dev asked me directly "Do you think we should cancel the release to fix this bug?" I wasn't sure of myself and he told me that "it's your call", and I said that yeah, we should fix the bug.
For anyone under 35 who is confused by this, was before releases were rolling and shipped online. When Microsoft released a major version back then, it had a (IIRC) ~10 year support contract attached to it (and if you found a bug and were on a good enough of a support contract, the dev team would develop a custom patch for you to fix a bug in a 9 year 6 month old release!), and a lot of gears were set in motion to make a release happen.
This was the norm at Microsoft for a long time. I was originally attracted to the SDET role because they were the last defender of the customer experience, they were the engineers who held the line on quality. The entire industry is worse off for the SDET role having been eliminated across all major software companies.