Ship It - Tales from the Trenches
trenchescomic.com
trenchescomic.com
I doubt they would fire a QA tester just for finding a bug. He might have been laid off with a bunch of other people or he might have been getting a big head about his prize defect. Granted, it is kind of a big defect. But some people can be sore winners.
Because you only get his side of the story, you don't know if the reason he was fired was because the other devs knew it wouldn't take that long to fix, or because he had some negative history with the company.
I'm not writing the guy off here. It just pays to be wary with stories like this that end with "and then i was fired", because the outcome and tone of the story automatically makes the reader feel that there is some sort of residual bitterness that has shaped the author's view negatively.
But I suppose if you get fired you have every right to be bitter about it too.
The difficulty in recruiting SDET'S / SET's is...ridiculous (though some companies don't different between a strong automation QA and a mid-SDET), however, as a single EG, a top-3 financial firm's Developer in Test positions (agnostic on languages) were the highest paid developers in the company (sans HFT). They were also held to the most strict of hiring standards (target school, Masters, 3.+ GPA, summa cum laude, stable work history of 3-5 years at a time with companies, etc.)
People just tend to get screwed over more often in the games industry because people think it's the holy grail of jobs, so you have 10 more poor saps lining up to replace every 1 who gets fired over something like this.
"The game shipped.
I got fired from my job at Dairy Queen in high school, but that's another story!"
1 - the marketing guy didnt listen to advice 2 - the developer introduced the problem
If the person giving the advice isnt there to say "Hey i already told them that ! but they didnt listen" they can declare it as a mistake or an unknown bug. Usually people dont get fired for an unknown bug and dont look "as bad" as if they where told and chose to ignore it.
Happened at my work a few times, engineer didn't get to the point of being sacked but when the severity 1 solution was ignored in preference of another more "stupid" solution proposed by business types the engineer that suggested the proper solution was never invited to meetings anymore. Then when the initial solution didnt work and used the said engineers solution they didnt even tell him they implemented it until weeks later when he found out indirectly.
[edit] hmm, after reading it again, its either what i wrote above or someone lied and said QA didnt find any problems so we shipped it based on their recommendation(which in my opinion is worse then a way to keep his mouth shut)