Tech Industry
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I do tech screens at Google. AMA
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Cyber truck killer: Chinese version of EV truck
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I have worked at TikTok US core tech for 3 years. AMA.
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Why is it so G*damn difficult to move money out of India
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What is the best way to say “No” to anyone at work or in general
Curious what other devs and QA people think about QA in the industry. Been in QA for 8 years and the last three have been all doing automation testing. Every team / company ive been on see it as important but not really essential to a scrum team and their norms. Also have had comments before in sprint planning, grooming, and retro “Yeah but your QA so you don’t really know how this works” or “Why did QA ask to point this another 2 pts, testing doesn’t take that long”, etc… It’s demoralizing, being an SDET I code full time and in most cases imo writing automation code can be more difficult then the actual functional code that was written and expected in the AC of stories. This has always been the case wherever I go. Why is QA just always treated as an afterthought or 2nd class citizens on a software development team? Is it because most companies (pry more so large corporate companies) are behind the times in terms of agile processes? TC: 120k (Midwest)
prolly cuz qa is seen as a cost center coupled with the idea that they are easily disposable
I agree with this in most cases as QA is usually handled by poor offshore resources. It later shows down the road in production and quality of code
Some people think their title directly aligns with their self worth. With that in mind they think QA may be lower because the interview might be easier or the pay scales differently. If everyone is working on a project together their feedback should be considered, and sometimes a person writing integration tests has a better idea of the larger system than someone that only worked on a piece. Everyone plays a part in a team and everyone should be respected. Any dev that thinks it's cool to shit on someone else is on some loser mentality.
Totally agree. I think some of the other people that have posted think I’m speaking of more general QA people like manual testers or offshore manual resources that just do regression testing at the end of a sprint or cycle of sprints. I’m specifically speaking as a SDET or software development engineer in test where my duties are automating testing by all means necessary either by coding or using some tool to automate testing APIs, systems and automating regression
Could you explain a bit what SDET does? For testing APIs for example, are you not just configuring requests and expected responses, or are you writing something which can be generalized for all API tests?
If qa code was that tough, they would done a QA of that code too. If you're writing too much code as a QA, you're QA is outdated
Wait what? If your writing too much automated testing code then your QA is outdated? No. You should actually have the opposite. You always want to avoid as much manual testing as possible
There should be no code/less code tools to do QA. In Microsoft we do our QA on our own and we have plenty of easy to use tools
EM here, the QAs I work with are so committed and no one understands our products better. I think EMs need to step up and recognize the contributions of QAs, devs need to be educated about their value as well. Also, for your own professional development, you should invest more in building better tooling, delegate more testing to the devs and hold them accountable for their features.
I try to hold the devs as accountable as possible and some of them are good but it’s just demoralizing when they don’t account for automation when pointing tickets since it’s in our definition of done. They truly hate hearing about it. I get it’s more work but it really shows in terms of ROI at the end of the day
Yo market doesn’t care about your feelings. If you think you are good, move to sde and prove it
Your right, I have thought about doing that but honestly, SDETs are in demand more so these days then devs since there are so few of us. Yes a senior QA engineer will never make as much as a senior sde, but I’m not there yet. The point of the post wasn’t to say I think I’m good at my job or hate on my job. Its just a observation and wanted some other devs or QA people’s opinions if they’ve ever experienced the same.
We dont have QA. I do everything from FE to BE. Actually I never know what is QA 😂. All the start ups I worked at dont have this Job title.
Not surprised. I’ve never worked at a start up though. Mostly have always worked at a more large corporate / enterprise company. They usually have QA engineers that are embedded in a agile team or there are more enterprise QA or manual testers (think old people that were BAs and were asked to move to QA, or offshore people that don’t know how to code) that are entirely their own department that range around 100-200 depending on the size of the company
Wait places still have QAs? Just like SREs, I thought software devs do all that work now
SDET generally don't have to design distributed systems and typically have less complexity and interdependencies in their code due to the nature of wanting to test things
Started my journey in software as SDET. Biggest mistake ever. So happy not doing it anymore. I could write a wall of reasons why it does not make sense to pursue a career in the QA field these days. However let me to summarize it like that: No one cares about quality anymore.
Damn dude sounds like you’ve experienced some tough work dynamics. I wouldn’t say no one cares about quality.
I know I sound like a boomer but let me tell you one more hard secret as well. No one cares about security anymore. This is worse but related to the above.
SDET here. Curious, what tooling did you write thats considered harder than functional code?
I’ve written API tests in Java that wasn’t very difficult but in terms of lines written vs the amount written for the actual code it’s a big difference. Also wrote an extensive performance test suite in python using Jmeter which was a lot of work and the custom calculations written were difficult. Also QA has much more busy work then in devs in that they have to write test plans and sometimes manual tests on top of the automation testing that is asked. Devs would never have to do those things (I’m not counting writing unit tests)