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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

> Their ego rises when they tell the developer that they were smarter.

I've been in QA for a few years, after an initial career in development.

I do find great pride and joy when I break things, and I do laugh sometimes when I see silly behavior. Testing can be thankless, and even anti-appreciated, so the validation of finding something is welcome.

But I never "tell the developer that I'm smarter," and I've never thought that way. They are merely two different roles, with different focuses and different allocations of time. The tester role exists in part because we are not perfect.

The relationship between the two roles would be much better without "I'm better than you" or "you can't do what I do, so you test" attitudes. Both sides, and the organization, profit when we work together with respect and appreciation.

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Maybe it was just me, but I read GP as slightly tongue in cheek - I hope most testers don't actually have such an antagonistic relationship with their devs!

I agree with you completely that they're underappreciated and minimized - I've seen corporations cut their testing staff in favor of automated tests, only to find that overall number of bugs between releases rises. (note: this is not a knock on automated tests)

I've also noticed an elitist mentality, usually among junior developers (but sometimes in senior devs or management as well), that a developer can do any job or role better than anyone else with a bit of training and coding. IMO, both of these are very immature views, and extremely dismissive of the value that domain expertise and a critical, analytical set of eyes can bring.

From the Dev end of the spectrum to the QA end: thanks for everything you folks do. Shitty software destroys people's confidence in our work and solutions, and rework is expensive and bug-prone: you save us from a lot of that.

>The relationship between the two roles would be much better without "I'm better than you" or "you can't do what I do, so you test" attitudes. Both sides, and the organization, profit when we work together with respect and appreciation.

The relative pay scale for a developer and tester with equivalent education and coding experience already speaks volumes about how deep that respect goes. Also, note who gets laid off first when the budget gets tight.

In a way that makes sense, when things are bad. You can sell bugs, but you can't test nothing ("first write a test that fails" notwithstanding).

But I never "tell the developer that I'm smarter,"

Agreed. I am also a tester and I would never do this. I try to encourage a more cooperative relationship with developers rather than a psuedo-antagonistic relationship.

I often think of the story about IBMs black team. It's a cute story, but in reality, you don't want your company running that way.

http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html#

Very true. If your business model is to be the smartest guy in the room, you have a problem, because there's always a smarter guy.

Maybe it's a coincidence, but the smartest guy in the room is often also the loudest and most dominating guy in the room.

Great to hear that you have the good tester mentality. My text was indeed meant to be a bit tongue in the cheek. But none the less it is completely correct.

The ego thing depends on the relationship you have with your colleagues. Sometimes I have very professional relationships with them, but other times they really become friends. And in that case, the "I'm smarter than you" really get's said, but more in a fun way.

I was a tester for a few years, and then moved into development. With tight deadlines on projects, I appreciate having a tester to send my work to for validation. Unfortunately, I am not doing TDD or any other automated testing, so having a second set of eyes is not something to take for granted. And usually, they don't laugh in my face when something is broken.

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