Went to a job fair last week to recruit interns. There where 4 different areas DevOps, Help Desk, Software Development, & QA. Software Development had the most traffic. The majority of Computer Science Majors had no interest in QA.

I was a little hurt by that, but can you blame them?

When going to college I never dreamed that I would be working on Testing & Software Automation.

My goal was to become a video game developer work in the industry for 20 years, start my own studio & be known as the black John Carmack

Can’t remember the last time I’ve played a video game. Still could happen though.

Back to never thinking I was going to be in QA.

Being a Tester is like being the bass player in a rock band. Being in QA can feel like being a Tai Chi master at an MMA event.

The stigma is still pretty thick.

This is something I’ve been dealing with for a while now. Asked someone about it and got a great answer here

The video brings up a good point, what happens when a tester has strong technical chops, solid coding background, and starts building out an automation framework?

I’m not going to try to convince anyone to start doing test automation or become a tester. Even though I’ve really enjoyed it, you should do what you want to do.

Testers should be respected.

Here’s my view, if your a Developer (front-end back-end, mobile) or Automation Engineer (SDET), you’re still a martial artist!

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. -Bruce Lee

Just like there are many types of combat techniques, software development has many different disciplines.

There’s still Full-Stack / Generalist. At the same time people can specialize or focus on learning techniques from multiple schools of thought.

Whats the point?

If you’re a software tester feeling down, don’t worry keep your head up remember you skills are need and do bring value to your startup. If you’re a developer think twice before looking down on someone in QA, because at the end of the day we’re all just martial artist.