- QA is always the first thing companies outsource, with predictable results
- Companies either go the route or “separate QA org with separate management chain” or “have QA engineers report to dev managers”. I’ve seen serious misaligned incentives and toxic outcomes with both
- Frequent Slack messages at 4:15 PM on Friday - “hey they just merged the PR, we really need it tested before Monday stand up”
- QA becomes a de facto dumping ground for glue work that other teams don’t want to do. Senior QA ends up morphing into a de facto “responsibility without authority” project manager role
- There is zero internet “community” around QA the way there is for developers or designers. There is no Slashdot or Hacker News for QA and there never will be. Just a bazaar of book authors and consultants promoting themselves on LinkedIn
IMO the only thing that makes sense anymore is having good SDETs embedded in engineering teams.
1. If the community has "healing power", it can accept new broken members as long as they don't overwhelm the support system. Many hippie and religious movements work with some version of this idea.
2. A struggling loner might be so because of traits unattractive to general society, but attractive to the community. Pretty much all subcultures fit here.
I used to feel that way but I’m completely over it, especially going through the experience of registering a few domains for side projects recently. There are just too many already squatted.
The only other market based solution I can think of is just charging like $10,000/yr minimum per domain name and forcing the plebs to use randomly generated strings like Tor onion sites
The participants in the train study were essentially given a "job" to talk to strangers, which completely changes the mental framing.
People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.
If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".
Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.
Eh, I got my comp sci degree in the 2000s and for the most part we learned barely enough to pass the exams. Colleges weren't exactly churning out an army of disciplined professionals well versed in low level programming. Most of us ended up working on PHP or Rails or some Enterprise Java monstrosity.
Then came of the flood of Leetcode in the 2010s. If you memorized the top 100 interview puzzles, you would have had a good chance to get paid 5x more than a kernel or firmware engineer, and you could have ridden the stock market to generational wealth
I’ve followed this issue for a long time, the thing is at the end of the day the average American just doesn’t care very much what happens to tech workers.
There’s an underlying attitude of “serves those entitled nerds right” on both the political left and the right.
- QA is always the first thing companies outsource, with predictable results
- Companies either go the route or “separate QA org with separate management chain” or “have QA engineers report to dev managers”. I’ve seen serious misaligned incentives and toxic outcomes with both
- Frequent Slack messages at 4:15 PM on Friday - “hey they just merged the PR, we really need it tested before Monday stand up”
- QA becomes a de facto dumping ground for glue work that other teams don’t want to do. Senior QA ends up morphing into a de facto “responsibility without authority” project manager role
- There is zero internet “community” around QA the way there is for developers or designers. There is no Slashdot or Hacker News for QA and there never will be. Just a bazaar of book authors and consultants promoting themselves on LinkedIn
IMO the only thing that makes sense anymore is having good SDETs embedded in engineering teams.