Your experience in EDG may vary depending on your manager. Some managers are very by-the-book while others are more laid back.
- You're no longer an "engineer". Any notion or aspirations you once had of actually designing something cool is kind of thrown out the window. Instead, the focus lately has been transferring people to the "quality engineering" team where you will be doing software testing once you're done with EDG. To maximize the benefits of a future career path, choose your team wisely. However, most look for an easy opportunity to transfer out without any serious thought or consideration while others are much more definitive about what they want (you’ll see senior EDG members who have been here for 3 years or more in this category). If you’re willing to work a little harder and brush up on C++, joining development instead of QE is a better career path (both pay and experience)
- The company as a whole is obsessed with quantifiable metrics, more so with the EDG group. Tech support cases take more priority over projects for the sake of customer satisfaction. Example: Didn’t contact a customer for more than 1 business day? Send them an email explaining your progress, even if you have no progress to report. Long weekends are usually followed by putting extra people on tech support for the flood of email cases that comes in. Projects are the key to transferring out of EDG, but the irony is that sometimes tech support over-rules this and you're forced to task-switch.
-A member in EDG is expected to "contribute" to the team however the sudden growth of this department head count has led to a deprivation of any sort of needed contribution. This usually leads to people coming up with very niche/useless "EDG-projects" that have little impact on actually helping anyone. Many meetings will be had and usually nothing will come of it. Ideas spawned by managers might turn into a “pilot project” where they may test a new procedure out. Some of these projects are useful and can benefit the team but it has been noted that a large majority of them just haven’t gone anywhere at all and are eventually killed because the idea was not-so-great to begin with.
- Process. Oh, and a ton of meetings, many of which can be skipped, especially for more senior members of the team.
-Try not to stick around for more than a year and a half in EDG. You’ll eventually have doubts about staying with the company over-all and wanting to do something else – generally, your level of involvement in answering tech support questions will stagnate and you’re encouraged to focus more on career development (picking up projects), however, you’ll still get blind-sided by tasks in contributing to the EDG team.
