Im a Senior QA engineer with an MS and 4 years exp in the bay area: TC 140k. While QA automation is fairly interesting,i feel saturated very easily and it appears that the path has limited future opportunities and every company essentially has proprietary frameworks i.e skills dont compound over time as much. Am considering asking for a lateral move to Professional services/Dev.(Im not fixed since I dont know what I can get and Im open to experimenting) Has anyone here attempted this? Did you feel it was worth it and what would I need to keep in mind? Which companies allow role change easily out of QA?
Get to dev path whenever possible.
My buddy did this at a FAANG. He started out in QA, got a dev mentor, prepped for dev interviews (cracking the coding interview), and eventually got hired as an engineer.
I know several people in my team that started on QA and have moved to the dev side after a few years. Definitely seems to be a common theme. I’m also interested in doing the same, but all of the coding I do for QA is in Python and the dev team uses a C language. Hoping I don’t lose all of my C programming skills before I’m ready to switch! I would definitely say it’s worth it (as long as you can find a good team). Only thing to note though is that the work load may be completely different between QA and dev and you just need to figure out if that’s okay with you.
Maybe it's better/easier to get promoted to QA Manager for QA folks? Why would you want to be another coder? No offense, just wondering
Fair question. Its possible to get promoted to QA manager but seemingly there is no obvious career trajectory after that. Partly because I’ve noticed people tend to get pigeon holed into the role forever unless they somehow get assigned broader responsibilities which is hard if you only ever own the QA function. On the other hand Ive seen people in dev/sales/solutions have more broader management opportunities.
Fair enough. Another side question. Can QA tester become a PM? Would be making any sense for QA Manager to move to PM?
After QA you should try to work on devops, test stability, overall product quality. QA Automation is where we all join in. But the overall goal is to be able to improve product quality. I think you will find that build and test infrastructure is a BIG area that has lots of cool stuff to do.
Agree there can be interesting QA work to be done and there are many smart folk working in Qa. Thats the only reason Im still only contemplating the move.