[absconditus]

I have been working in QA for a few years now and have made several observations.

* The people who are good at QA usually have the skills to work as a developer. QA is generally not as desirable as development to a young developer, so why do it?

* Many QA people are almost completely useless and exist just to generate paperwork so that the company can cover its ass. Warning signs for bad QA people seem to be certifications and fear of anything that does not strictly adhere to classic waterfall development. The bulk of all defects are found by a small number of people on my team.

* Most developers are horrible at testing and writing unit tests. We have thousands of unit tests and the main thing that they catch is that someone did not update the test after refactoring code.

[hvs]

For the most part I agree with you. I will say that I have met those in QA over the years that may or may not have been good developers, but were phenomenal testers and truly enjoyed their work. They loved being able to break things (seriously), but they also were great at being able to document how to recreate issues and explaining it to the developers.

Sadly, those people are not as common as they should be. There's honestly a huge market opportunity for high quality testers and it's not something that requires years of training. Heck, maybe we can solve the unemployment problem by just convincing companies to care more about quality software! ... probably not, though.

[imperialWicket]

It is unfortunate how true these statements are. I followed to standard path of starting in QA and moving to development. While I do not think it's a bad path of itself, I think it is unfortunate that a lot of really great QA analysts hang up their QA title in order to develop. I think one of the core problems is that QA is treated as entry level; which is odd, because as you point out, most devs are practically incapable of testing effectively.

Even though most orgs do not officially treat the positions as an entry level (QA), and a mid-level (junior dev) - I think the general unspoken understanding is that devs are higher on the food chain. The two positions need to be established as more distinct and less like rungs in the same ladder.

[gamble]

If it's hard to find good QA guys when there's a career path, it's even harder when there's a wall between dev and QA. QA is considered entry level in most companies because the jobs are entry level. Most companies barely value the monkeys-on-keyboards style of QA, much less the more skilled and better paying QA roles that would tempt smart people to stick with a career in QA.

[absconditus]

I believe that Google treats their "QA" people well. Of course their "QA" people are probably better developers than most developers at other companies.

(I put QA in quotes because their testing structure does not seem to be at all similar to most companies.)

[dgabriel]

> * Most developers are horrible at testing and writing unit tests. We have thousands of unit tests and the main thing that they catch is that someone did not update the test after refactoring code.

I wish this were less true, but it's totally spot on. I have definitely been guilty of this sin...