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Comment by eden_hazard | Hacker News Reader

I'm a QA engineer and this is freaking infuriating. I just went on Linkedin and 0 QA engineers. Just some QA associates that have no tech backgrounds. And one QA Engineer opening. I wonder how long it's been open? How does a trading platform not have a big team of QA engineers? Some dev managers, devs are so freaking arrogant. They think since they aren't coding, they aren't smart and they aren't important.

This isn't the first time that it's happened. Robhinhood should have been prepared. This is unforgiveable.

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As someone who also needs to explain the importance and nuance of QA engineering to my startup partners, do you have any go-to resources you use to describe/sell the position? Genuinely want to expand my ability to speak to the role.

Point them to situations like this. Maybe small e-commerce sites can get away with it but financial and health tech companies should always double, triple, check everything. Move fast and break things is fine for new startups but once you have a significant amount of users, the reliability of the product should be the main source of pride for the company.

I know not every company needs it. I was the second QA engineer at a food-tech startup in Boston 5 years back. QA got laid off after 10 months but they are still successful without QA right now. They hire great devs and have a great process. At the end of the day, if the site stops working, people will just get some late food deliveries. One the other hand, I've a friend working at Ford in Michigan and he says they have no code. You have hundreds of engineers and everyone manually tests their own code. He says sometimes he will test for a couple of minutes and just push his code. I don't blame him. Devs are great at writing code. Let them write code but have someone else test their code please.

I've a small options position open on Robhinhood. I'm not too worried about it but I imagine some people have tens and hundreds of thousands. I've read some rumors that this outage was caused by the leap year timing and it happened 4 years ago too. This is just unacceptable.

Genuinely curious, are there a set of a disciplines a software QA engineers has to have? What tools do they use? (I only know they do software testing, but this could mean a lot of different things)

I understand what Devops (a similarly amorphous term) people do, but I've never had a clear picture of what the day-to-day life of a QA engineer would look like.

You know the new way of software development is to throw code out there and let the paying customers test it.

If that's the case there is no excuse for it.

What's wrong with people who think that they can have SDLC without a proper QA? I've seen this many times in the SV. Developers thinks that QA is just waste of time and their stellar code doesn't need any testing, because: "Hey, if something goes wrong I can always roll back". I don't buy it.

Most big SV web companies employ SRE, not QA to manage and improve the reliability of distributed web systems. Robinhood currently has SRE positions open so it’s not as if they aren’t thinking about this at all

Yeah, agreed. Makes me also wonder how secure my information is with them. Definitely not ideal.

Often it's not dev managers, but a level above who don't prioritize QA engineering because they see it as a cost center and find it difficult to quantify the risk. If it's not leading to growth it is de-prioritized until fires are burning.

A lot of the trouble is that good QA -- and good engineering practices in general -- usually comes down to some equation like velocity x quality = $. If you want to increase your code quality, you either have to slow your velocity or jack up your $'s -- and usually you end up doing some combination of both, going a little bit slower and spending a little bit more money.

And if there's one thing people hate more than going slow it's spending more money.

Being a QA guy myself, I am of the opinion that this sums it up pretty well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

My reformulation is mostly out of ignorance, but since this is the internet, I will contend in a fit of pique that in modern software development, velocity (which is basically scope / time) is more interesting than the two factors individually, because so many of us live in a nightmare world where there are not finished projects, just continuous iterative release cycles.

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