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Could this be one of the most meaningless and trite jobs whilst still maximizing prestige? How many people will work this job in despair? How many intelligent p

Could this be one of the most meaningless and trite jobs whilst still maximizing prestige? How many people will work this job in despair? How many intelligent people will spend years coding the obscurity that is test infra?

RandomOpinion 10y ago
"Let he who is without sin^H^H^Hbugs cast the first stone." Developers ought to be appreciative that there are people willing to do QA and test infrastructure for them.
- zardeh 10y ago
  (also, speaking as a SETI at Google, I've never written a test for someone else's code. I build tools that make testing easier. I write tests for my own code, because I'm building applications that are complex enough to require tests.)
dang 10y ago
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.
- serge2k 10y ago
  I don't think a comment is unsubstantial just because it's potentially inflammatory.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I think it's not because of potential but because it was intended to be inflammatory. You can discuss most controversial and inflammatory subjects by applying some diplomacy and tact.
- johansch 10y ago
  He/she did address an interesting and touchy subject of software development. It could have been more diplomatic, but then also, I'd say, needlessly watered down. A challenge in software development has long been the division between test and development. You could do as Microsoft recently did (more or less abolished "test").. the jury is still out on whether that is what has caused the recent Windows 10 quality issues. Or you could keep a tester/developer separation. Good luck trying to recruit top (e.g. your testers should on average be as smart as your developers) people for the tester positions unless you are Google/Facebook. Either way, I think this is a really interesting issue. It should be noted: some pieces of software are a lot easier to test by its developer (say, a compiler) than others (say a GUI).
  - enigmo 10y ago
    MS abolished manual testing (STE) positions prior to Windows Vista being released, somewhere around beta 2 or rc1. Vista probably suffered from this but Windows 7 didn't.
    - jacalata 10y ago
      No they didn't. Source: I joined MS after Vista was released and worked with manual testers.
      - enigmo 10y ago
        Did they have the STE title or SDET? When this happened it wasnt like there was 100% automation in place so developers, architects, SDETs, had to pick up the slack. I personally got stuck verifying bug fixes for our components (kernel stuff and supporting user mode services) in various languages I don't speak (particularly fun for left to right languages) just to get the bug count down. That team had something like 20 STEs that got the axe post beta 2.
        jacalata 10y ago
        No idea what their titles were but they worked entirely running manual tests. I ran some manual tests myself as an SDET but this was different.
jerf 10y ago
If taken seriously, writing test code can be both a technical challenge in its own right, and can also fold in a bit of the fun that hacking systems can offer. You're out to break things rather than exploit them, but it can be similarly fun. I think there's a certain amount of recursiveness in the way we look down our nose at test code; we don't like it, so we write code that isn't easy to test, which makes it even harder to write code that is testable in the next composition layer of the system. Repeat a few times and the test code gets pretty horrifying. But somebody needs to crack that nut.
kajecounterhack 10y ago
No, SETI isn't QA or "Test Engineering" at other companies. SETI at Google is like any other infra team, except they specialize in testing infrastructure. All devs write their own tests. You can think of it like the engineers behind rspec vs people who use it. Or the engineers behind Selenium, etc. They're engineers first and foremost and while you're free to have the opinion that this line of engineering is "meaningless and trite" at Google SWEs really appreciate the tools SETI teams build.
FT_intern 10y ago
Tools and infrastructure SWEs at the bigger companies get paid as much as regular SWEs
- ohwello 10y ago
  Without giving away too much detail, I was switched from a "tools and infrastructure SWE" (quoting you, not the actual job title) to a regular SWE halfway through the interview process at a top company. The base salary stayed the same but the stock grant got a lot bigger and I was treated better in other ways. I also got a SWE offer from the other top company right before the change occurred, so these factors are entangled and I can't establish causality, but I feel the recruiter considered me higher priority as a standard SWE candidate and told me about the change like it was great news.

RandomOpinion 10y ago

"Let he who is without sin^H^H^Hbugs cast the first stone." Developers ought to be appreciative that there are people willing to do QA and test infrastructure for them.

zardeh 10y ago
(also, speaking as a SETI at Google, I've never written a test for someone else's code. I build tools that make testing easier. I write tests for my own code, because I'm building applications that are complex enough to require tests.)

dang 10y ago

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.

serge2k 10y ago
I don't think a comment is unsubstantial just because it's potentially inflammatory.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I think it's not because of potential but because it was intended to be inflammatory. You can discuss most controversial and inflammatory subjects by applying some diplomacy and tact.
johansch 10y ago
He/she did address an interesting and touchy subject of software development. It could have been more diplomatic, but then also, I'd say, needlessly watered down. A challenge in software development has long been the division between test and development. You could do as Microsoft recently did (more or less abolished "test").. the jury is still out on whether that is what has caused the recent Windows 10 quality issues. Or you could keep a tester/developer separation. Good luck trying to recruit top (e.g. your testers should on average be as smart as your developers) people for the tester positions unless you are Google/Facebook. Either way, I think this is a really interesting issue. It should be noted: some pieces of software are a lot easier to test by its developer (say, a compiler) than others (say a GUI).
- enigmo 10y ago
  MS abolished manual testing (STE) positions prior to Windows Vista being released, somewhere around beta 2 or rc1. Vista probably suffered from this but Windows 7 didn't.
  - jacalata 10y ago
    No they didn't. Source: I joined MS after Vista was released and worked with manual testers.
    - enigmo 10y ago
      Did they have the STE title or SDET? When this happened it wasnt like there was 100% automation in place so developers, architects, SDETs, had to pick up the slack. I personally got stuck verifying bug fixes for our components (kernel stuff and supporting user mode services) in various languages I don't speak (particularly fun for left to right languages) just to get the bug count down. That team had something like 20 STEs that got the axe post beta 2.
      - jacalata 10y ago
        No idea what their titles were but they worked entirely running manual tests. I ran some manual tests myself as an SDET but this was different.

jerf 10y ago

If taken seriously, writing test code can be both a technical challenge in its own right, and can also fold in a bit of the fun that hacking systems can offer. You're out to break things rather than exploit them, but it can be similarly fun. I think there's a certain amount of recursiveness in the way we look down our nose at test code; we don't like it, so we write code that isn't easy to test, which makes it even harder to write code that is testable in the next composition layer of the system. Repeat a few times and the test code gets pretty horrifying. But somebody needs to crack that nut.

kajecounterhack 10y ago

No, SETI isn't QA or "Test Engineering" at other companies. SETI at Google is like any other infra team, except they specialize in testing infrastructure. All devs write their own tests. You can think of it like the engineers behind rspec vs people who use it. Or the engineers behind Selenium, etc. They're engineers first and foremost and while you're free to have the opinion that this line of engineering is "meaningless and trite" at Google SWEs really appreciate the tools SETI teams build.

FT_intern 10y ago

Tools and infrastructure SWEs at the bigger companies get paid as much as regular SWEs

ohwello 10y ago
Without giving away too much detail, I was switched from a "tools and infrastructure SWE" (quoting you, not the actual job title) to a regular SWE halfway through the interview process at a top company. The base salary stayed the same but the stock grant got a lot bigger and I was treated better in other ways. I also got a SWE offer from the other top company right before the change occurred, so these factors are entangled and I can't establish causality, but I feel the recruiter considered me higher priority as a standard SWE candidate and told me about the change like it was great news.