I've worked in the QA department of a fortune 500 company for almost 5 years now developing software and leading projects to deliver testing strategies and tests for very complex technologies.

Now that I'm looking around for new jobs, people seem to think that there is a clear segmentation between people who do QA and people who do software engineering. I find it frustratingly common that people assume I have no engineering talent because I am a QA guy.

Do you guys think that when you see people who work in QA?

8/21/2013 3:02:04 PM

Jesus Christ, I think I'd wet myself with glee if I ever met someone who actually did QA at my job.

8/21/2013 3:23:21 PM

From my personal experience, QE == untrained monkey, at least for the product that I work on. Maybe it's a bad assumption, but I view QA as a step down from software engineering.

8/21/2013 4:03:04 PM

Quote :

"Jesus Christ, I think I'd wet myself with glee if I ever met someone who actually did QA at my job."

For real.

8/21/2013 4:04:18 PM

Companies generally hire untrained monkeys (recent grads/interns) for QA cause its a good place for them. They cant do any real damage with the dumb crap they learned in school and they can learn how stuff actually works irl. If they're competent you can promote them into development or they get hired away. If they're idiots you just let them sit there and constantly pound thru boring ass tests.

Once you start getting larger people get more focused and your developers don't really have the time to write tests, so you need someone to take that over. They also generally manage the test and build environment which is a whole other thing than what most people consider normal QA but generally falls under the same umbrella

Like when I think QA I visualize a monkey pressing buttons in the application in the same sequence over and over to make sure it always does the same thing.

Then you've got the QA manager aka the monkey wrangler and the test/build developer who does all the test development and handles build management.

Most places wont have test/build developers. If they're large enough they will have monkey wranglers. All but the smallest companies will have monkeys.

8/21/2013 4:08:07 PM

And that's how it is in some places, I'm sure.

But it's not what I've been doing and it annoys me how explicitly I've had to explain that to people.

ITT: iI get held down by association with qa monkeys

8/21/2013 4:22:00 PM

If qa person is more along the lines of a test engineer, its different than some dumb shit who tries to hold a kaizen event or lean projects that do nothing to actually improve the process.

Also, prevent yourself a little differently, if you're having job transition trouble... You didn't find problems, you found problems and did root cause analysis, and potentially even offered solutions.

[Edited on August 21, 2013 at 6:06 PM. Reason : .]

8/21/2013 6:04:18 PM

look at MS's SDT

8/21/2013 6:10:39 PM

I feel I'm in the same boat where I am in QA, and I've been doing a lot more than "monkey" work but most people still consider QA primarily that. Unfortunately, that is what most of us in test do, and a lot of management is somewhat OK with that if numbers look good.

For instance, they just moved one of our contractors to a full-time senior position because that is what they had open. She didn't have the experience for that role, so they bumped down the experience requirements to 3 years on the job posting. We had to teach her basic networking for fucks-sake. She got better, but it was still mid-level grunt work; however, the sprint team liked working with her (manual UI testing only) and "she has a masters so we can't hire her at any lower level". So thus she was hired.

Our manager wanted her put in charge of part of our Linux testing framework. He believed she would be a good fit because she was "a Unix developer in her previous position" and had Unix/Linux as skills on her resume". Turns out she had only used "Graphical UI Unix" (whatever the fuck that means) and never touched a console (Unix, DOS, or otherwise) before. You know you are in deep-shit when the person doesn't know what the heck the "ls" command does.

---

QA work is what you make of it, unfortunately. I won't say I'm not compensated properly or respected (I'm actually really highly regarded), but situations like this just undermine how QA can be a highly productive area where you can build a career and move into other more refined disciplines..

8/21/2013 9:00:28 PM

It's really funny to me that lots of SDEs shit on SDET/SDT/QA, when probably 90% of them aren't nearly as good as they think they are. The haughtiness is especially hilarious when they get called out for simple shit.

[Edited on August 21, 2013 at 10:14 PM. Reason : .]

8/21/2013 10:12:01 PM

My opinion on QA depends on if the team uses automated testing (Selenium not QTP ). If they do, the people doing QA are usually better engineers than the developers, if they don't, then the QA people are usually similar to BAs.

8/22/2013 9:00:50 AM

see, this is what I'm talking about:

Quote :

"You didn't find problems, you found problems and did root cause analysis, and potentially even offered solutions. "

The first sentence in my original post says I "develop software" because I do, but already the advice is dumbing it down like I'm just running tests. That's not the case.

Quote :

"My opinion on QA depends on if the team uses automated testing (Selenium not QTP )."

The company I work for doesn't make websites. They develop on operating system that sits on a box (or several) behind enterprise level servers running enterprise applications for large businesses. We don't have a pre-boxed testing solution, we (the QA engineers here) create the program that runs the scripts that we write that tests the product. Once we have determined that the product meets our quality bar and we have regression tests in place to catch any slips, we hand the repetitive test running work off to a secondary team in India who does the button pressing and churns through hundreds of boring tests. The point is that we extend the program that automates testing for each feature we touch in addition to writing the test scripts that run in the system.

You guys are haters

[Edited on August 22, 2013 at 9:37 AM. Reason : ]

8/22/2013 9:36:45 AM

QA is underrated, underfunded, and underappreciated.

I see it every day. regression bugs, dev escapes, hell, even basic functionality issues that should have never passed unit testing.

A little more additional funding in QA would probably avoid manyfold more in costs incurred in backend support for a lot of large companies

8/22/2013 12:50:28 PM

Quote :

"You didn't find problems, you found problems..."

?

8/22/2013 4:33:09 PM

What's the difference between a qa engineer and a software engineer in test, if any?

8/22/2013 8:20:35 PM

At least in our organization, a Software Engineer in Test tends to be a tester who specializes more in writing code and test framework. "Regular" QA/Test Engineers tend to do more of the manual or prolonged (performance/system) testing.

8/22/2013 9:03:11 PM

Where I am, the QA guys are completely worthless. They have little to no knowledge of the system, no knowledge of the business domain, hardly any technical knowledge, if any, and can't even design a decent test case to save their asses. They essentially look at QC all day (a complete piece of shit system as far as quality engineering goes. if your QA software has massive bugs in it, your QA engineers probably aren't any better) and wait for a requirement to go into the "ready to test" phase and then walk over and ask me how to test it. They don't say "can you give me more information about this and how to reproduce the original bug" or whatever. They literally ask, verbatim, "how do I test this?"

I used to be nice and explain things, but after over a year at this place now and learning that many of these people have been there for five or more years, now I just tell them that knowing how to test software is their job, and I don't have time to do my job and their job at the same time and go back to my work. Most of them are now smart enough not to ask me that question any more, so they go ask someone else who has been here less than I have, and hasn't yet reached the point of realizing that those monkeys should know how to write a test case after five years in QA on the same software system.

8/22/2013 9:59:32 PM

QA is a part of everybody's job, not just the "QA" group. For the software product I'm on, our Support, Test, Development and Technical Writers meet on a regular basis to discuss product QA. Everybody takes away todos and in the long run it improves relationships, decreases stress and lowers total workload. Major stuff can still slip through the cracks, but its rare these days.

To the OP, that being said for me it does not mean untrained monkey. It means we as a larger technical team missed something either before the product was released, or worse, after it was released and now its our collective jobs to figure out how to fix it.

[Edited on August 22, 2013 at 10:24 PM. Reason : .]

8/22/2013 10:16:15 PM

QA is a pretty vague term. Put what you actually do on your resumé and if it's impressive, it'll impress people.

You've got mashing buttons and filing tickets on one end of the spectrum and architecting massive automated testing and reporting solutions on the other. Don't fuck yourself over by letting people think you do less than you do.

8/24/2013 1:36:28 PM

My resume says precisely what I do. That doesn't change the fact the people see "QA" as the position and immediately associate an idea with that, which is the problem I've described facing.

8/25/2013 1:09:22 AM

After interviewing nearly a hundred candidates I'd pretty much define anyone coming out of a fortune 500 company as being an untrained monkey.

Tell me more about your enterprise java experience.

8/27/2013 5:24:33 PM

Quote :

"You've got mashing buttons and filing tickets on one end of the spectrum and architecting massive automated testing and reporting solutions on the other. "

The first thing you're describing is QA. The second is build/test engineering.

8/27/2013 6:27:41 PM

Maybe that's the problem, then. I should change the "QA" listing on my resume to "Build/Test engineer" and see if I have better luck.

8/27/2013 6:48:50 PM

likely

engineer is a much better keyword than QA

8/27/2013 7:00:13 PM

Absolutely. While you may be part of the QA department on an org chart, its a different skillset then a traditional QA role. Its a relatively rare skillset and companies looking for those skills will want to see them out front.

8/27/2013 7:00:26 PM

Quote :

"I'd pretty much define anyone coming out of a fortune 500 company as being an untrained monkey."

Please don't feed the troll. There are fortune 500 companies that are the primary contributors of the specifications for J2EE. I hope at least one of those people working on the specifications from those fortune 500 companies isn't an "untrained monkey".

To the OP, definitely sounds like you need to brush up your resume and cover letter more. There's a LOT of good/interesting things that can be done with QA. Try to also note what the results were. "Built series of scripts to test product". OK, great, so what? "Build series of scripts to test product, reducing timelines by 20%". etc.

For my resume: "Custom cloud solution which can auto-provision PaaS systems in 8 minutes." Won't state the impact here, but its significant.

[Edited on August 28, 2013 at 8:17 AM. Reason : .]

8/28/2013 8:16:28 AM

j2ee has plenty of garbage and plenty of enterprise devs dont really know what they're doing anyways.

like its not 1999 anymore, you dont need to generate the xml you're sending in a string builder. just use cxf goddamn.

8/28/2013 11:45:30 AM

Quote :

"For my resume: "Custom cloud solution which can auto-provision PaaS systems in 8 minutes." Won't state the impact here, but its significant."

So like 7 minutes slower than Amazon?

8/28/2013 1:12:16 PM

i thought he worked at amazon

8/28/2013 1:49:22 PM

Quote :

"For my resume: "Custom cloud solution which can auto-provision PaaS systems in 8 minutes." Won't state the impact here, but its significant."

http://www.opscode.com

[Edited on August 28, 2013 at 5:04 PM. Reason : Really, I mean this highlights my point about Enterprise Dev folks]

8/28/2013 5:03:20 PM

Ehh, won't feed the trolls. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to have a good technical discussion. Will leave it at that and won't derail the thread further.

8/28/2013 8:47:15 PM

I think the takeaway here is that while puffing up your resume can be good, don't do it in such a way that makes you look silly.

8/28/2013 11:39:59 PM

I would say that that 8 minutes probably needs to be taken in context. If it's in an environment like most enterprises, where the speed of innovation is slow, then yes, 8 minutes is something to get excited about. At any rate, it is a conversation starter, not a career summed up in one sentence.

What's more important is showing the ability to think clearly and solve problems. If you're looking at his resume with the narrow scope of "lol 8 minutes compared to fastprovision.io.net.docker.opscode.amazon," then I'd suggest that you're probably well out of line saying things like "you look silly" without actually engaging the dude to find out what problems he's solved and the constraints he's done it under.

Quote :

"After interviewing nearly a hundred candidates I'd pretty much define anyone coming out of a fortune 500 company as being an untrained monkey. Tell me more about your enterprise java experience."

If you're interviewing 100 people yourself, then you are doing it wrong. Find a good technical recruiter so you're not picking through resumes of any Joe off the street.

There's plenty of good enterprise devs out there, they just get snatched up for jobs by recruiters who know what they're doing.

[Edited on August 29, 2013 at 8:16 AM. Reason : .]

8/29/2013 8:16:11 AM

People still use J2EE?

There are recruiters that actually filter candidates effectively instead of picking random and taking their $30K cut?



[Edited on August 29, 2013 at 9:30 AM. Reason : A]

8/29/2013 9:28:44 AM

No they fuckin suck.

"Oh we see you're a well experienced test engineer, but we're looking for someone who has specifically tested android apps for at least 2 years"

like writing fucking junit tests for android apps is supposed to be rocket science. /bitch

8/29/2013 10:07:51 AM

Quote :

"What's more important is showing the ability to think clearly and solve problems. If you're looking at his resume with the narrow scope of "lol 8 minutes compared to fastprovision.io.net.docker.opscode.amazon," then I'd suggest that you're probably well out of line saying things like "you look silly" without actually engaging the dude to find out what problems he's solved and the constraints he's done it under."

He was the one who made a post about it without any context which is what looks silly. I'd rather a resume say "Custom cloud solution which can auto-provision PaaS systems" than specify the amount of time it takes because the time makes it sound significantly less impressive/interesting.

Quote :

"There are recruiters that actually filter candidates effectively instead of picking random and taking their $30K cut?"

I'm yet to find proof they do anything other than that and call relentlessly.

8/29/2013 11:30:33 AM

I remember my time in enterprise. I'd have product manager's telling me the UI was so slow because it was loading SO MUCH data! Where SO MUCH was about 6000 rows. I refactored it slightly and it loaded in 3 seconds.

It was effectively opening a new DB connection for every row and every column instead of doing a join.

8/29/2013 11:34:20 AM

Quote :

" like writing fucking junit tests for android apps is supposed to be rocket science."

if its android specific stuff you're testing its probably a pain in the dick if you're trying to go for widest compatibility because of all the platform fragmentation.

so 2 years of android unit testing experience may mean they know all the common fuckups the individual vendors have done in their distros.

[Edited on August 29, 2013 at 1:33 PM. Reason : .]

8/29/2013 1:31:04 PM

Quote :

"There are recruiters that actually filter candidates effectively instead of picking random and taking their $30K cut?"

There are a few. Unfortunately most are shit.

Generally, they're former technologists themselves.

[Edited on August 29, 2013 at 8:07 PM. Reason : .]

8/29/2013 8:06:46 PM