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In my experience a QA is to an engineer what a nurse is to a doctor. They take measurements and can have a good eye for what might be going on, but they don’t k

by wincy 4y ago

In my experience a QA is to an engineer what a nurse is to a doctor. They take measurements and can have a good eye for what might be going on, but they don’t know the code. A QA automation engineer is more like a nurse practitioner. It doesn’t mean they aren’t smart but if they could write code they would, unless you’re working somewhere that compensates QAs and engineers the same (which I’ve never seen). Had a QA coworker try to learn to code and he just couldn’t quite get it.

seneca 4y ago
I think that's a apt and succinct analogy. Completely agreed.
dgb23 4y ago
Proper testing, especially manual, explorative testing is _incredibly_ difficult and it can also be mentally exhausting and tedious. IMO a good tester is worth their weight in gold. And I think as a developer one can benefit greatly from thinking and working more closely to and with testing and usability. I'm possibly biased, because explorative testing is one of my weaker areas as a dev. I'm way better at debugging once I know that there is a problem, but finding a problem that I don't know about yet, I find quite hard to do to say the least. And I think it's awesome to observe people who are really good at this kind of thing.
g_sch 4y ago
That's an interesting choice of analogy. Just a few weeks ago there was a popular submission here reporting how 90% of nurses are considering leaving their profession in the next year due to burnout and poor working conditions [0]. It's true that doctors receive more training, but without nurses (hell, even with any fewer nurses than we have now) our health system would completely collapse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180646
- thebean11 4y ago
  Ehh, not sure I'd make the comparison. Plenty of tech companies don't have QA engineers. Hospitals without nurses not so much..
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    It's a very rough analogy. Required skills for an entry level QA tester is pretty low. It's essentially "do these things in a video game, look for bugs". It's certainly not just having fun playing video games all day, it's far more rote, but it's hardly a scare skill. Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Yeah. Companies make the engineers do the nursing work on top of the doctor work, with a dose of self service nursing for the customers, who need to report their own symptoms into a tracker as well as gather and report their own vitals during their treatment. The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system. Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.
ProfXponent 4y ago
I’m stealing this, was struggling to explain this the other day
ethbr0 4y ago
It's an apt analogy, becauses nurses often know more about what's going on with patients and practical realities, but doctors are more capable of reasoning through complex root causes and designing future care plans. Everyone has their expertise and strengths.
femiagbabiaka 4y ago
The thing is: consumers don’t care about which job within the development cycle is the hardest or whatever else. They care that their software is relatively bug free. The industry as a whole has been cutting costs in QA and the games are buggy as all hell on release as a result with only a few exceptions. So maybe this QA unionization can save the industry from itself: from dumb dick measuring status games like the ones this comment thread is filled with and from the hubris required to charge 60-80 bucks for unplayable games.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  On the other hand, making QA more expensive might just mean there's going to be even less QA work done.
jimbob45 4y ago
That’s maybe the most romanticized notion I’ve ever read on this website. QA are more like janitors to dev doctors. They are required to know little to nothing in regard to coding, their jobs speciously require creativity, and they’re effortlessly replaceable. Doctors cannot do their job without nurses. MS just tossed their entire QA staff with no apparent consequences.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Absolutely accurate. QA is not nearly that essential.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  Agreed. In the places I’ve worked with dedicated manual QA, I’ve tended to see net negative impact. It can be like working with someone who has the technical understanding of a user, but with write access to Jira, and whose reason for employment is predicated on being a blocker with some frequency. The best places I’ve worked have instead had engineering cultures of robust automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous delivery.
  - philistine 4y ago
    Sounds like you’re not working in video games, where QA is far more common and useful.
    - strix_varius 4y ago
      True
somenameforme 4y ago
At least in emergency care, nurses independently resolve the vast majority of cases (though of course the doctor on duty has the final say/responsibility) and also have significant medical training. Nurses are also responsible for triaging (prioritizing) cases which is not infrequently a life and death level of responsibility. As part of their education nurses are also required to take classes which are generally considered weedout in the sciences, such as organic chemistry. Most nurses could likely become doctors if they so chose, but 8 years of education, a few more years in residency/'bootcamp', and at many places having insane hours + being always on call, and everything else that comes with being a doctor is not everybody's cup of tea. A nurse is much more comparable to something like a dev whereas a doctor is something closer to a combination of the tech and dev leads. QA doesn't really have an appropriate analog in medicine because every person plays a critical role. A hospital without nurses would become instantly inoperable. By contrast companies can, and have, scrapped their entire QA departments and continue to function more or less normally. I think a key issue is that software that's overtly buggy reflects more on poor development and management practices than it does on poor QA practices.
richardjdare 4y ago
When I worked in QA many years ago I was just as much a coder as I am now. As a self taught programmer from an unpromising background I tried to take the route that was most accessible to me. I wasn't the only programmer or artist in the QA team looking for a way up. Before I got that job I worked in a factory cleaning up animal figurines with a dentists drill after they came out of the moulds. I could code then too. The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  > The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial. Luck and circumstance definitely play a part in the job you do, but it's plainly not true that your job says nothing about what you're capable of.

by wincy 4y ago

seneca 4y ago

I think that's a apt and succinct analogy. Completely agreed.

dgb23 4y ago

Proper testing, especially manual, explorative testing is _incredibly_ difficult and it can also be mentally exhausting and tedious. IMO a good tester is worth their weight in gold. And I think as a developer one can benefit greatly from thinking and working more closely to and with testing and usability. I'm possibly biased, because explorative testing is one of my weaker areas as a dev. I'm way better at debugging once I know that there is a problem, but finding a problem that I don't know about yet, I find quite hard to do to say the least. And I think it's awesome to observe people who are really good at this kind of thing.

g_sch 4y ago

That's an interesting choice of analogy. Just a few weeks ago there was a popular submission here reporting how 90% of nurses are considering leaving their profession in the next year due to burnout and poor working conditions [0]. It's true that doctors receive more training, but without nurses (hell, even with any fewer nurses than we have now) our health system would completely collapse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180646

thebean11 4y ago
Ehh, not sure I'd make the comparison. Plenty of tech companies don't have QA engineers. Hospitals without nurses not so much..
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  It's a very rough analogy. Required skills for an entry level QA tester is pretty low. It's essentially "do these things in a video game, look for bugs". It's certainly not just having fun playing video games all day, it's far more rote, but it's hardly a scare skill. Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).
- falcolas 4y ago
  Yeah. Companies make the engineers do the nursing work on top of the doctor work, with a dose of self service nursing for the customers, who need to report their own symptoms into a tracker as well as gather and report their own vitals during their treatment. The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system. Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.

ProfXponent 4y ago

I’m stealing this, was struggling to explain this the other day

ethbr0 4y ago

It's an apt analogy, becauses nurses often know more about what's going on with patients and practical realities, but doctors are more capable of reasoning through complex root causes and designing future care plans. Everyone has their expertise and strengths.

femiagbabiaka 4y ago

The thing is: consumers don’t care about which job within the development cycle is the hardest or whatever else. They care that their software is relatively bug free. The industry as a whole has been cutting costs in QA and the games are buggy as all hell on release as a result with only a few exceptions. So maybe this QA unionization can save the industry from itself: from dumb dick measuring status games like the ones this comment thread is filled with and from the hubris required to charge 60-80 bucks for unplayable games.

Aerroon 4y ago
On the other hand, making QA more expensive might just mean there's going to be even less QA work done.

jimbob45 4y ago

That’s maybe the most romanticized notion I’ve ever read on this website. QA are more like janitors to dev doctors. They are required to know little to nothing in regard to coding, their jobs speciously require creativity, and they’re effortlessly replaceable. Doctors cannot do their job without nurses. MS just tossed their entire QA staff with no apparent consequences.

renewiltord 4y ago
Absolutely accurate. QA is not nearly that essential.
strix_varius 4y ago
Agreed. In the places I’ve worked with dedicated manual QA, I’ve tended to see net negative impact. It can be like working with someone who has the technical understanding of a user, but with write access to Jira, and whose reason for employment is predicated on being a blocker with some frequency. The best places I’ve worked have instead had engineering cultures of robust automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous delivery.
- philistine 4y ago
  Sounds like you’re not working in video games, where QA is far more common and useful.
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    True

somenameforme 4y ago

At least in emergency care, nurses independently resolve the vast majority of cases (though of course the doctor on duty has the final say/responsibility) and also have significant medical training. Nurses are also responsible for triaging (prioritizing) cases which is not infrequently a life and death level of responsibility. As part of their education nurses are also required to take classes which are generally considered weedout in the sciences, such as organic chemistry. Most nurses could likely become doctors if they so chose, but 8 years of education, a few more years in residency/'bootcamp', and at many places having insane hours + being always on call, and everything else that comes with being a doctor is not everybody's cup of tea. A nurse is much more comparable to something like a dev whereas a doctor is something closer to a combination of the tech and dev leads. QA doesn't really have an appropriate analog in medicine because every person plays a critical role. A hospital without nurses would become instantly inoperable. By contrast companies can, and have, scrapped their entire QA departments and continue to function more or less normally. I think a key issue is that software that's overtly buggy reflects more on poor development and management practices than it does on poor QA practices.

richardjdare 4y ago

When I worked in QA many years ago I was just as much a coder as I am now. As a self taught programmer from an unpromising background I tried to take the route that was most accessible to me. I wasn't the only programmer or artist in the QA team looking for a way up. Before I got that job I worked in a factory cleaning up animal figurines with a dentists drill after they came out of the moulds. I could code then too. The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.

strix_varius 4y ago
> The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial. Luck and circumstance definitely play a part in the job you do, but it's plainly not true that your job says nothing about what you're capable of.