[hinkley]

It probably could though. Or at least to the extent that declarative languages ever really work for real world problems.

But iif you perfected it then it would also be the thing that actually kills software development. Because if I told you your whole job is now writing tests, you’d find another job.

[nemomarx]

Isn't this project management, kinda? writing requirements and acceptance criteria and broad designs to hand off to a dev

[hinkley]

Not any manager I've ever worked with. Including the good ones (but especially not the bad ones).

Their job is to make sure that the business people and the devs sort it out without coming to blows. When they do work like this it's generally as a template to be copied, not the entire project.

[lazyasciiart]

Not that long ago that was a literal job for some software engineers. Whole departments of them.

[hinkley]

I love a quality QA engineer.

But the only people who write code as bad as QA folks do are the DevOps people.

The paradox of SDETs is: QA makes less than dev, no matter what flavor. If you're good at poking holes in developer logic, and you can code yourself, there's a 40-60% raise for you if you can switch into security consulting, which takes the same foundational skills and some reading.

So there are at least two brain drains for "good coder in test", and we aren't even the most lucrative one.