Well first off, i'm sorry for that off the cuff comment. I didn't mean to downplay the importance of QA (the world would suck without it, for sure) nor the imp

Well first off, i'm sorry for that off the cuff comment. I didn't mean to downplay the importance of QA (the world would suck without it, for sure) nor the importance of QA positions. It just isn't development, which was what I was looking to do. I agree very much with Joel Spolsky's thoughts on the subject. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html As to my story, I was placed into QA in the "choice" program because they misrepresented the role (it was an internship). The skills required listed C programmer, but on the first day, I was told there would be no programming. The first few weeks I configured test beds. This was a lot of installation of server stuff (mostly following check lists) and configuration of networks. This was very IT'ish, and though important (and it sparked my interest in how exactly networks work, which I followed up on my own time), it wasn't what I was hoping for. I got into automated testing shortly thereafter because they needed someone to do it and I had a lot of programming experience. I coded in Java using an IBM testing thing and a company framework provided by another QA person. This framework was buggy and _completely_ undocumented. In one place, there were 14 nested If/For's. There were obvious design flaws. Not only that, the person who wrote it was wholly unavailable (constantly busy). She did find time to do reviews when I only had an hour left in the internship to respond to them. Ironically, one complaint was that I recreated her functionality in some parts (if only I'd KNOWN about it!) So, in short, my experience dictates that QA in large organizations means people that don't give a crap and do the bare minimum. I don't know if this is a QA problem or a large corporation problem, but no thanks to either.