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The lack of respect and commensurate compensation at a lot of companies doesn't help. QA is often viewed as something requiring less talent and often offshored

The lack of respect and commensurate compensation at a lot of companies doesn't help. QA is often viewed as something requiring less talent and often offshored which layers communication barriers on top of everything. I've met QA people with decent engineering skills that end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice. Tell them a proposed change and they'll point out how it could go wrong or cause issues from a customer perspective.

pixl97 9mo ago
This 100% Companies think QA is shit, so they hire shit QA, and they get shit QA results. Then they get rid of QA, and then the devs get pissed because now support and dev has turned to QA and customers are wondering how the hell certain bugs got out the door.
kayo_20211030 9mo ago
Yes. The best QA people are gold. Infuriating at times, but gold. > end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice The best I've worked with had this quality, and were fearless advocates for the end-user. They kept everyone honest.
- hinkley 9mo ago
  I was at a company once where they were talking about trying to do a rewrite of an existing tool because the original engineers were gone. But the requirements docs were insufficient to reach feature parity, so they weren’t sure how to proceed. Once I got the QA lead talking they realized he had the entire spec in his head. Complete with corner cases.
hinkley 9mo ago
Yeah and then we started expecting them to code. Which has not gone well. And the thing is if you have the suspicious mind of a top rate QA person and you can code well, you’re already 2/3 of the way to being a security consultant or a Red Shirt engineer and doubling your salary.
throwway120385 9mo ago
This is why your duty in engineering is to drag QA into every specification conversation as early as possible so that they can display that body of knowledge.

pixl97 9mo ago

This 100% Companies think QA is shit, so they hire shit QA, and they get shit QA results. Then they get rid of QA, and then the devs get pissed because now support and dev has turned to QA and customers are wondering how the hell certain bugs got out the door.

kayo_20211030 9mo ago

Yes. The best QA people are gold. Infuriating at times, but gold. > end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice The best I've worked with had this quality, and were fearless advocates for the end-user. They kept everyone honest.

hinkley 9mo ago
I was at a company once where they were talking about trying to do a rewrite of an existing tool because the original engineers were gone. But the requirements docs were insufficient to reach feature parity, so they weren’t sure how to proceed. Once I got the QA lead talking they realized he had the entire spec in his head. Complete with corner cases.

hinkley 9mo ago

Yeah and then we started expecting them to code. Which has not gone well. And the thing is if you have the suspicious mind of a top rate QA person and you can code well, you’re already 2/3 of the way to being a security consultant or a Red Shirt engineer and doubling your salary.

throwway120385 9mo ago

This is why your duty in engineering is to drag QA into every specification conversation as early as possible so that they can display that body of knowledge.