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This is totally a thing. In the late 90s when I worked at Microsoft and then at startups, QA was made up of full time employees whose leadership had input into

This is totally a thing. In the late 90s when I worked at Microsoft and then at startups, QA was made up of full time employees whose leadership had input into the product process. Today at my large tech company, QA is mostly contract employees validating test plans that the normal engineers author. Zero autonomy or ownership offered.

JoshTriplett 2y ago
Also, there's a huge difference between teams where QA is seen as a stepping stone on the path to graduating into "real" development, versus teams where QA is viewed as a critically important role that's valuable in itself. There needs to be a role for senior QA engineers, because if all your junior QA folks are looking to "graduate" to development you won't get expert QA folks who really care about QA. I've seen what great senior QA engineers can do. Proactive approaches to testing; integrating new approaches to testing; influence on architecture and design to make codebases more robust; optimizing testsuites so they can run more often; better capture of long-tail errors from production; design and implementation of scratch infrastructure to test more things before production...
- oautholaf 2y ago
  Yeah I completely agree. In the era where people could build a career in this area, they developed skills and brought insight that made the whole product better. Automated testing and SRE/DevOps reliability that I see focused on today do not fill in the gaps.
- hinkley 2y ago
  QA people are very bimodally distributed. Excluding managers, 90% of the best and the worst coworkers I’ve ever had have been QA. If you have drive and focus you can be amazing. If you have neither then you’re an albatross around the team’s neck. It’s a very passive aggressive way to root out a problem in an organization by just removing it. To your comment about being a path to coding: if you can code well and test well, you should skip entirely over being a software dev and go into security consulting. Instead of a 40% pay bump you could be looking at an 80% pay bump. What is a red team member but a coder with the suspicious mind of a QA person?

JoshTriplett 2y ago

Also, there's a huge difference between teams where QA is seen as a stepping stone on the path to graduating into "real" development, versus teams where QA is viewed as a critically important role that's valuable in itself. There needs to be a role for senior QA engineers, because if all your junior QA folks are looking to "graduate" to development you won't get expert QA folks who really care about QA. I've seen what great senior QA engineers can do. Proactive approaches to testing; integrating new approaches to testing; influence on architecture and design to make codebases more robust; optimizing testsuites so they can run more often; better capture of long-tail errors from production; design and implementation of scratch infrastructure to test more things before production...

oautholaf 2y ago
Yeah I completely agree. In the era where people could build a career in this area, they developed skills and brought insight that made the whole product better. Automated testing and SRE/DevOps reliability that I see focused on today do not fill in the gaps.
hinkley 2y ago
QA people are very bimodally distributed. Excluding managers, 90% of the best and the worst coworkers I’ve ever had have been QA. If you have drive and focus you can be amazing. If you have neither then you’re an albatross around the team’s neck. It’s a very passive aggressive way to root out a problem in an organization by just removing it. To your comment about being a path to coding: if you can code well and test well, you should skip entirely over being a software dev and go into security consulting. Instead of a 40% pay bump you could be looking at an 80% pay bump. What is a red team member but a coder with the suspicious mind of a QA person?