[jamesfinlayson]

> Writing automated end-to-end tests? Those are very often best done by those writing the software

This so much - but most of the places I've worked at have insisted that manual testers with zero programming experience should build and maintain the test frameworks. Talk about trying to push a square peg into a round hole. Granted some of the testers have embraced it and not done a terrible job but by and large most of the testers have had no idea and done very little.

[QuercusMax]

Building high-quality test infrastructure often requires more skill than building the software it supports. Some of the most impactful work I've done in staff/principal roles has been test infra.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yep, very very true. Unfortunately some of the places I've been at more recently have believed that mock servers are the best way to do end to end testing. It was a battle I couldn't win, but no one was willing to see that testing critical UI flows against something that spits back canned JSON could hardly be considered thorough testing.