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Part of this is the hubris of Big Tech in shedding test teams and skilled testers in favor of devs who claim they can do it themselves. And then don’t. Because

Part of this is the hubris of Big Tech in shedding test teams and skilled testers in favor of devs who claim they can do it themselves. And then don’t. Because they don’t enjoy testing, and they aren’t rewarded for doing good testing.

bsimpson 3y ago
I was shocked when I went from a small company with an incompetent QA team to big tech with...usually no QA team. I also presumed that if I worked at a big tech company, I could file bugs for all the rough edges I encounter using their products and get them fixed. That allure wore off after frequently getting no response until the responsible team declares "bug bankruptcy" years later. The few major products that do have QA seemed to be staffed by incompetent offshore call centers. You file a bug that says something like "this div is missing padding" and it'll get routed back to you asking for you to attach logs (because some training somewhere must say all bug reports need logs). There's frequent "I told you so" ferver when a bad review comes out, echoing all the feedback some PM roundly ignored during dogfood. I've found a good day-to-day team which has kept me around so far, but there's always the back 40% of my mind wondering if I should quit, sell all my stock, and stop using our products. It's depressing being surrounded by so many talented individuals, yet seeing the company make boneheaded product decisions and show total indifference to the quality of what it ships.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  Given that, it's no surprise that using any big tech product in the current year is a sad, underwhelming, mildly frustrating experience. Everyone seems to have collectively forgotten how cool it felt to use gmail back in the day, for example. Getting an iPhone 3GS was, for me, magical. But the incentives and economic realities are so vastly different right now, I wonder if we'll ever recapture that spirit.
mnau 3y ago
I doubt devs actually say that they can do testing themselves. It sounds like something manager says. The reason is what you wrote later: it's not fun and they don't do it properly (e.g. full test case instead of testing just changed part) and they know it.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I've been on two test teams and three dev teams... I think devs can do it, and I say as much when I'm in dev mode. The manager just has to recognize that 80% of the time this will mean a 20% increase in dev time while the tests are written, and 20% of the time it'll mean a 400% increase while things are refactored to remain testable. It sucks. The rest of the business doesn't get it. But the alternative is that you end up painted into the same corner: in need of that drastic refactor, except the people who it's blocking (QA) don't feel empowered to do it, meanwhile the devs just keep shipping features because they're not the ones that are blocked. Better to take that occasional slowdown than to have nobody owning it at all.

bsimpson 3y ago

I was shocked when I went from a small company with an incompetent QA team to big tech with...usually no QA team. I also presumed that if I worked at a big tech company, I could file bugs for all the rough edges I encounter using their products and get them fixed. That allure wore off after frequently getting no response until the responsible team declares "bug bankruptcy" years later. The few major products that do have QA seemed to be staffed by incompetent offshore call centers. You file a bug that says something like "this div is missing padding" and it'll get routed back to you asking for you to attach logs (because some training somewhere must say all bug reports need logs). There's frequent "I told you so" ferver when a bad review comes out, echoing all the feedback some PM roundly ignored during dogfood. I've found a good day-to-day team which has kept me around so far, but there's always the back 40% of my mind wondering if I should quit, sell all my stock, and stop using our products. It's depressing being surrounded by so many talented individuals, yet seeing the company make boneheaded product decisions and show total indifference to the quality of what it ships.

isoprophlex 3y ago
Given that, it's no surprise that using any big tech product in the current year is a sad, underwhelming, mildly frustrating experience. Everyone seems to have collectively forgotten how cool it felt to use gmail back in the day, for example. Getting an iPhone 3GS was, for me, magical. But the incentives and economic realities are so vastly different right now, I wonder if we'll ever recapture that spirit.

mnau 3y ago

I doubt devs actually say that they can do testing themselves. It sounds like something manager says. The reason is what you wrote later: it's not fun and they don't do it properly (e.g. full test case instead of testing just changed part) and they know it.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I've been on two test teams and three dev teams... I think devs can do it, and I say as much when I'm in dev mode. The manager just has to recognize that 80% of the time this will mean a 20% increase in dev time while the tests are written, and 20% of the time it'll mean a 400% increase while things are refactored to remain testable. It sucks. The rest of the business doesn't get it. But the alternative is that you end up painted into the same corner: in need of that drastic refactor, except the people who it's blocking (QA) don't feel empowered to do it, meanwhile the devs just keep shipping features because they're not the ones that are blocked. Better to take that occasional slowdown than to have nobody owning it at all.