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Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are

Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselves test engineers? How often do you find a software engineer who wants to work as a test engineer? There's a hidden snobbery in the industry against quality, testing, and automation engineering.

kentm 4y ago
You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.
schrodinger 4y ago
I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!
monksy 4y ago
It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing. It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.
Matthias247 4y ago
I've worked as a principal engineer at Amazon before, and I can tell that testing and quality there isn't looked down upon. You can definitely get promoted just for improving products and never building any new feature. However it will matter a lot on where you spend your effort on, and whether your environment understands why it matters. If you just mention "I'm writing integration tests" - and nobody knows why it's important to do that right now - it will likely not go too far. However if it's along "we have this regular operational issue that everyone in my org including the director was aware about, I fixed it, added integration tests, and made sure I added automation that will catch further regressions before our customers will observe them" - it will go a long way.

kentm 4y ago

You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.

schrodinger 4y ago

I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!

monksy 4y ago

It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing. It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.

Matthias247 4y ago

I've worked as a principal engineer at Amazon before, and I can tell that testing and quality there isn't looked down upon. You can definitely get promoted just for improving products and never building any new feature. However it will matter a lot on where you spend your effort on, and whether your environment understands why it matters. If you just mention "I'm writing integration tests" - and nobody knows why it's important to do that right now - it will likely not go too far. However if it's along "we have this regular operational issue that everyone in my org including the director was aware about, I fixed it, added integration tests, and made sure I added automation that will catch further regressions before our customers will observe them" - it will go a long way.