Pros
I absolutely love being able to work in software R&D with a Bachelors degree in English. Tinkering with software is one of my favorite hobbies, and Epic lets me polish and practice my skills and turn them into money. ++ Lifelong learning + More or less get to carve out your own space within the role
Cons
- Compensation is a black box, and your only tool to inform decisions about whether you feel you're being fairly compensated is an anonymous forum/app. QMs make about half of what developers make to start, which you take with a grain of salt at the beginning, but slowly starts to eat away at your soul when you realize everyone around you makes twice as much as you do, and that gap widens every year - New responsibilities are continually added to the QM job description, and compensation never catches up - COVID response prioritized getting bodies back on campus over health and well-being of employees and benefits of remote work - Remote work provisions prioritize minimizing time worked away from campus over flexibility and autonomy - Little room to specialize in the QM role. Too much "everybody spend X hours a week doing Y" and not enough "hey let's have these people who are really good and efficient at Y do Y a lot."