yeah my experience is basically the same, usually if a place has qa at all, it's one person in a team who doesnt have an adequate environment or data set to tes

yeah my experience is basically the same, usually if a place has qa at all, it's one person in a team who doesnt have an adequate environment or data set to test with and they effectively end up just watching the developer qa their own work and i end up screaming into a pillow every time i see "Tester: hi" pop up on my screen. the one exception to this was when i was qa (never again) and i made sure we only ever did automated tests. unfortunately management was nonexistent, devs made zero effort to work with us, and naturally we were soon replaced by a cheap offshore indian team who couldn't tell you the difference between a computer and a fridge anyway. i think a lot of it just stems from companies not caring about qa, not knowing who to hire, and not knowing what they want the people they hire to achieve. "qa" is just like "agile", where nobody can be bothered to actually learn anything about it, so they make something up and then pat themselves on the back for having it.