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by crabbone 972 days ago
> much like [...] QA testers have mostly disappeared.

Who told you that?

QA isn't going anywhere... someone is doing testing, and that someone is a tester. They can be an s/w engineer by training, but as long as they are testing they are a tester.

With sysadmins, there are fashion waves, where they keep being called different names like DevOps or SRE. I've not heard of such a thing with testing.
2 comments
namtab00 972 days ago
> someone is doing testing, and that someone is a -tester- user

excuse me for remembering something surely HN considers a platitude: "everyone has a TEST environment, few are fortunate enough to also have a PROD one"

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crabbone 971 days ago
Well, let me take this seriously for a moment. I believe that companies which don't have dedicated testers today are the same companies which didn't have dedicated testers before.

We really use the language of "users doing the testing" jokingly. No software is written w/o testing, not even very trivial programs would run firs time. So, we just mean that there wasn't enough testing, when we say that.

There is a process, however, that is meant to decrease the number of testers employed. The more testing can be automated, the fewer testers would be necessary... but that hinges on the premise that prior number of testers was somehow sufficient for the amount of testing that was necessary. I believe though that the number of testers hired was a function of budget more than anything else. There's never enough testing, and, in principle, it's hard to see how testing can be exhaustive. So, hopefully, with more automation, it's possible to test more, but, I believe that the number of testers will remain more or less the function of budget.

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slyall 972 days ago
> With sysadmins, there are fashion waves, where they keep being called different names like DevOps or SRE.

I don't think the name change really originated with Sysadmins. Basically these new titles were created (with narrow definitions) and then other companies said "We are cool like Google, we have SREs now, no Sysadmins" so all the jobs had new titles.

Source: Me and my last 4 jobs ( Sysadmin -> Devops Engineer -> Infrastructure Developer -> SRE ) which are all basically the same thing

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