Thread 106197582

Right now, QA (Quality Assurance; helps test code by writing unit tests) is paid and valued fairly poorly among tech careers. For instance, a QA Engineer can expect to rake in $40-50k a year, in contrast to a software engineer / developer who can expect to rake in over $100k, or IT engineers or data analysts who can expect to earn between $60-100k.

However, will the emergence of AI change this? All those AI agents need someone to validate them, especially if they were designed with copious amounts of vibe-coding.

Moreover, the prospect of well-earning salaries for SWEs, or even "SWEs with extra bells and whistles" like data and MLE engineers, is quickly dampening thanks to AI; internships are generally a toxically competitive million-round mosh-pit where even candidates who score perfectly on the OAs fail (just look at the ones like C1, JPMC, and Roblox which have recently come out), and full-time roles can have a gorillion rounds and be even more of a bloodbath (especially for candidates lacking prior internship experience).

It's undeniable and almost inevitable that the skill and field are losing some luster in an age when any common, uncredentialed Joe can pull up Claude Sonnet 4 / Gemini 2.0 Pro / ChatGPT-5, and vibecode whatever app his likes (even more so if paying for the subscription tiers of each). Could this where the once-maligned QA specialization rises in prominence?

(Other tech or tech-adjacent roles that I foresee possibly rising in prominence: cybersecurity; electrical engineering; semiconductors. I also predict an attempt at labor activism / unionization that will ultimately fail due to outsourcing, opposition to which would severely be at odds with woke leftism - the same reason labor activism/unionization failed in the construction industry in the South and SW.)

ain't nobody gonna read all that

>>106197582 (OP)
Senior Dev here: QA is dying and will be dead/done by Pajeets very soon. Seriously, no future.

>>106197582 (OP)
Senior QA here, earning 50k but shitskin and living in a poor, third world country. Life is cheap here so salary is pretty good.
My company is actually hiring more QA's, thanks to AI devs are more prone to make mistakes plus AI can't really develop proper system regression tests.

>>106197663
As opposed to what other tech jobs? Uncle Sam-maxxing?

>>106197695
If said country is China, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Peru, Chile, or Uruguay, is it bad that I actually envy you a bit?

>>106197582 (OP)

Former test automation here.

Been unemployed for 10 month, but didn't actively look for a job, because I feel it's dying out.

Rajeets occupied the area + nobody gives a shit about your experience unless you're a QA Manager.

When I was 31 I was the oldest guy in a room full of QAs/AQAs.
They hired a lot of 22-26 y.o. people.

If you're 35 - you're fucking dead.
I saw just very few people in their 30s-40s who work as QA/AQA.

It's a dead end Pajeet job.
I'm actively looking where to switch to.

>>106197582 (OP)
I am currently stuck in QA but it seems nobody else wants to do QA at my company.

>>106197582 (OP)
you mean this /qa/ right?

QA lost

>>106198016
It's insane how pajeets made the tech sector almost undesirable.
On the bright side, small and mid-size companies usually are allergic towards them.

>>106197582 (OP)
I am a Software QA, there are 4 main domains in it Manual Testing, Automation Testing, Performance Testing & Security Testing

Security Testing is probably gonna be the domain with most job opportunities, with all the vibe coding who knows what kind of vulnerabilities were left exposed

Performance Testing is imo gonna be the next secure job in QA domain since its very hard to automate all the tasks involve in it with.

Automation Testing is gonna be completely wiped out, its bottom of coding skill and imo LLMs can easily eat up this role in less than 5 years. The only reason it hasnt yet is because of concern with hallucinations and perhaps data related policies

Manual Testing probably one of the last jobs to go in QA domain since it requires a lot of nuances and heuristic approach

Having said this if there are advances in AI enough then I see all deskjobs becoming obsolete. Operator/Agent like AI scare me because they seem to understand instruction in natural language and are able to perform the tasks on a computer. Right now they are limited to tasks that don't take more than couple of hours before they lose track. But how many years are they gonna have such constraints till they improve enough

>>106198016
>I saw just very few people in their 30s-40s who work as QA/AQA.
Welp, I am one of them. I have been trying to get promote to at least a Lead role but AI has been fucking me for a while

bro really thought we needed the definition of QA before continuing his post

>>106197582 (OP)
>QA (Quality Assurance; helps test code by writing unit tests)
Man I fucking wish they did that much. I've never worked at a place where the QA people wrote any tests. They just do whatever testing isn't automated and the automated shit is written by the same developers who write the rest of the application, like myself. Seriously, I wish they wrote fucking tests so I didn't have to, but nah. They don't. They just test some shit manually and then supposedly give it their stamp of approval and frankly they don't do a thorough job of that either, like the thoroughness of their testing is at the level where if there's any weird edge case that I fail to consider while writing the code & automated tests then there's a 99% chance that the QA people will also miss it entirely. As a dev I feel like I'm basically pressured to handle all the testing as well because I can't trust the fucking QAs to catch anything tricky anyway, there is no additional safety net. If I miss a bug then there's a huge chance it makes it all the way into production.

Now I don't think I should write buggy code and I endeavor not to, but nobody's perfect and like once every few years I fuck up and miss something and sure enough it makes it all the way to prod. I feel like the QA position fucking exists mostly so management can feel good about having "specialists" who test and ensure the product is bug-free, but they don't actually do that in practice. They just exist to assuage worries.

short answer: no
long answer: nope
t. only read the thread title, no way am i reading all that gay shit

>>106202866
>, I wish they wrote fucking tests so I didn't have to, but nah
Well you already know the code, so now a second guy has to learn it too and understand every possible code path.

How easy is it to get a job as a QA? I want to do software dev down the line but the job market is supposedly very bad right now.

QA should really be a target for AI. The work is boring and repetitive and in my experience skilled QA guys are rare because of how shitty the work is.

my only experience with QA is the game industry and even there its a low totem pole job. you dont even shape the feedback of the game, you're just given a script to follow and if you dont you're gone.

QA is going to be automated by AI, it was already mostly offshored to jeets. Manual testing QA is why QA is mostly low pay labor, if QA was writing automated tests for requirements, managing test pipelines, etc. it would be better paid, but I've only worked with 1 QA person who was capable of any of that, and they typically move to engineering if they're competent

>>106197582 (OP)
>QA (Quality Assurance; helps test code by writing unit tests)
Back in the day, I did both testing and Quality Auditing, two very different things. They have one crucial thing in common though: once there is a whiff of financial difficulties, these roles (along with documentation) go out the window.

>>106203158
Even those are competitive in my exp

>>106197582 (OP)
If not AI then formal verification, TQAD

The QA job market looks bad right now, for some reason I got fired as a QA despite how QA is supposed to be more important during this AI boom and buggy software

>>106203158
I do both white box testing and black box testing and have enough years of experience that an HR stacy would not pass me over

I haven't found any work since the end of Covid

Instead I got a semi-shit job as a fucking nursing technician because healthcare is the only place that hires fucking everyone.
I need about 2,000 more a month from my porn game patreon before I can fuck off forever

>>106206752
Have you tried moving near san francisco?

>>106206775
I'd rather cut off my dick

>>106206775
>have you tried moving somewhere more expensive

>>106204027
Even in today's job market where switching careers is often career suicide?

>>106202986
QA's are supposed to do black box testing anyway i.e do testing without knowing the code

>>106202986
But that's not unit testing

>>106210033´
But that's not unit testing.

Just a reminder that when you approach 35 and definitely before 40 you have to move over into management, or be steamrolled.

>>106210794
Yeah, QA's arent supposed to do that. Devs are supposed to do unit testing which would be white box testing

>>106210829
This is like 40 year old virgins but for tech. In a few years it could be true in both for me

>>106197582 (OP)
QA is the one being replaced by AI
AI can write unit tests

yea QA is getting ofshored to jeets but goddamn are they shitty at their work, all of the qa the jeets do for the company i work for is fucked, bugs and exploits everywhere, almost like it wasn't quality tested