You can basically be assigned to any team you want but the leadership generally does not let you do work except in a few teams (CLR, Research, etc.). There are

You can basically be assigned to any team you want but the leadership generally does not let you do work except in a few teams (CLR, Research, etc.). There are a few reasons that struck me during my time there - all related to perverse incentives: 1. There are too many PMs. You could fire all the engineers and the PMs would keep holding meetings for a couple of years reshuffling priorities, co-ordinating interactions across teams and "making hard feature cuts". The last thing is especially comical: The dev team would be behind schedule and the PMs would be very proud that they are macho enough to drop certain features in order to ship. In spite of this, I saw some very good people become PMs instead of devs since that's the only way you get any say in the direction of the product. They all end up spending an insane amount of time with powerpoint decks for shallow reviews by upper management. 2. Secondly, the split between test and dev orgs leads to some perverse incentives. As a dev, you are looked upon slightly favorably (though not goaled on) for fixing bugs that you created. 3. The mid-level leadership is not hungry/driven enough. Virtually all the mid-level people running teams have little to prove after they make partner. Its the standard principal agent problem where the agents are too risk averse. These factors make it hard for people (especially engineers) to feel like they are making a difference.