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I stepping-stoned through QA on my way into development, now a decade something ago, and this part stands out as especially true in my experience: > This creat
by ptmcc 3y ago
I stepping-stoned through QA on my way into development, now a decade something ago, and this part stands out as especially true in my experience:
> This created a self-reinforcing spiral, in which anyone “good enough at coding” or fed up with being treated poorly would leave QA. Similarly, others would assume anyone in QA wasn’t “good enough” to exit the discipline. No one recommends the field to new grads. Eventually, the whole thing seemed like it wasn’t worth it any more. Our divorce with QA was a cold one — companies just said “we’re no longer going to have that function, figure it out.”
I've worked with a handful of talented career software QA people in the past. The sanity they can bring to a complex system is amazing, but it seems like a shrinking niche. The writing was on the wall for me that I needed and wanted to get into fulltime dev as QA got increasingly squeezed, mistreated, and misunderstood. At so many companies QA roles went into a death spiral and haven't recovered.
Now, as the author points out, a lot of younger engineers have never worked with a QA team in their career. Or maybe have worked with a crappy QA team because its been devalued so much. So many people have never seen good QA that no one advocates for it.
- reactordev 3y ago>anyone in QA wasn’t “good enough” This is why. Engineers have some of the most inflated egos that they set an extremely high bar for being “part of the club”. Sometimes that’s corporate policy (hire better than you) and sometimes it’s just toxicity (I am better than you). Without realizing that the most valuable skills they could learn are soft skills. I’m open to finding anyone willing to code. Whether it’s from QA, sales, Gerry’s nephew, recent CS grad, Designer turned coder, or that business analyst that taught themselves Python/Pandas. A good QA team is sorely missed. A bad QA team turns the whole notion of QA teams sour. Just the same for development teams :D I think devs are first line of defense. Unit tests etc. QA is second line (should we release?), feature testing, regression, UX continuity, etc. There’s value in it if you can afford it.