alt Hacker NewsCoz while devs with specialties usually get paid more than a generalist, for some reason testing as a specialty means getting a pay cut and a loss in respect and stature.
Hence my username.
I wouldnt ever sell myself as a test automation engineer but whenever i join a project the number one most broken technical issue in need of fixing is nearly always test automation.
I typically brand this work as architecture (and to be fair there is overlap) and try to build infra and tooling less skilled devs can use to write spec-matching tests.
Sadly if i called it test automation i'd have to take a pay cut and get paid less than those less skilled devs who need to be trained to do TDD.
I think there are 3 'kinds' of QA who are not really interchangeable as their skillsets don't really overlap.
- Manual testers who don't know how to code at all, or at least arent' good enough to task them with writing code
- People who write automated tests (who might or might not also do manual testing)
- People writing test automation tools, managing and desigining Test infra etc. - these people are regular engineers and engineering skillsets. I don't think there's generally a difference in treatment or compensation, but I also don't really consider this 'QA work'
As for QA getting paid less - I don't agree with this notion, but I see why it happens. Imo and ideal QA would be someone, who's just as skilled in most stuff as a dev (except does something a bit different), has the same level of responsibility and capacity for autonomy - in exchange I'd argue they deserve the same recognition and compensation. And not giving them that leads to the best and brightest leaving for other roles.
I think it's amazing when one gets to work with great QA, and can rest easy that anything they make will get tested properly, and you get high quality bug reports, and bugs don't come back from the field.
Also it bears mentioning, that it's self-evident to me, but might not be self-evident to everyone, that devs should be expected to do a baseline level of QA work themselves - they should verify the feature is generally working well and write a couple tests to make sure this is indeed the case (which means they have to be generally aware how to write decent tests).