Quality assurance workers at Activision Blizzard subsidiary unionize
latimes.com
latimes.com
If you have a dedicated QA team that is staffed by people who don't write software, those people are at best technicians. They are not peers of the engineers, they're a different job function with a much much lower barrier to entry. They're closer to the customer support team than they are to engineering.
That's not to say that they are somehow undeserving of basic respect. They are (as are support personnel), but given the choice between QA and engineering, almost anyone would choose engineering. The reason QAs aren't on engineering teams is that they can't pass the interviews. The inverse is not true.
None of that is to bash QA. But pretending they're peers of engineering and lamenting that they aren't treated as equals is just based on a fantasy.
You have just built an elaborate strawman. No one argued for equal rights/equal salary/equal treatment of QA people with their dev peers. They are just looking for better work conditions and better job security.
It doesn’t mean they aren’t smart but if they could write code they would, unless you’re working somewhere that compensates QAs and engineers the same (which I’ve never seen). Had a QA coworker try to learn to code and he just couldn’t quite get it.
I'm possibly biased, because explorative testing is one of my weaker areas as a dev. I'm way better at debugging once I know that there is a problem, but finding a problem that I don't know about yet, I find quite hard to do to say the least. And I think it's awesome to observe people who are really good at this kind of thing.
Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).
The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system.
Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.
Everyone has their expertise and strengths.
Doctors cannot do their job without nurses. MS just tossed their entire QA staff with no apparent consequences.
It can be like working with someone who has the technical understanding of a user, but with write access to Jira, and whose reason for employment is predicated on being a blocker with some frequency.
The best places I’ve worked have instead had engineering cultures of robust automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous delivery.
Most nurses could likely become doctors if they so chose, but 8 years of education, a few more years in residency/'bootcamp', and at many places having insane hours + being always on call, and everything else that comes with being a doctor is not everybody's cup of tea.
A nurse is much more comparable to something like a dev whereas a doctor is something closer to a combination of the tech and dev leads. QA doesn't really have an appropriate analog in medicine because every person plays a critical role. A hospital without nurses would become instantly inoperable. By contrast companies can, and have, scrapped their entire QA departments and continue to function more or less normally.
I think a key issue is that software that's overtly buggy reflects more on poor development and management practices than it does on poor QA practices.
The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.
Luck and circumstance definitely play a part in the job you do, but it's plainly not true that your job says nothing about what you're capable of.
Being QA is not that much different from engineering. During my childhood I quite enjoyed breaking games if I could. I hated being restricted, and I loved hacking[1] them. Speedrunning works much in the same way. This is what lead me into engineering. Of course one requires much more education, but I'd argue that the time, dedication, and thought process is about the same.
A small group but maybe if it doesn’t cause the death of the world it will continue.
The small team makes a game called “Call of Duty” so it’s definitely up from an indie studio.
Activision is likely to drag their heels on negotiating for years, unfortunately.
What strikes out at me is that only 19 of the 350 people at the company are unionizing. It's as though someone like specifically release engineers are going on strike, and 80+% of other developers are not. What keeps the company from just reassigning building releases to the other 80% of the developers?
It's asinine to think they are just playing the games - QA has complex skills necessary to succeed, from technical writing to careful test planning to cross organizational planning. QA is some of the least rewarding and most difficult work in a games studio.
It's like asking why camera operators in film sets "get paid to watch movies". We've decided we like games, so we better pay people for the labor in making them.
Fuck off with this "it's an honor" bullshit. It's work. It deserves good working conditions.
There are bad parts of every job. The fun part of SWE is coding, but that doesn't mean I don't have to write design docs, coordinat between different teams, etc.
>It deserves good working conditions.
I agree, but that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
these people have stopped licking the boots of capitalism and started to demand change. there’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s no inherent moral value that people should adhere to in their work relationship that precludes them from forming a union.
Personally I cannot wait for these “engineers” to be treated like normal technicians.
The odd sense of superiority that people like OP seem to have is nauseating.
If someone else is capable of doing my job for half the pay, then hats off to them, and they deserve it.
So no, it's not hyperbole to suggest the poster is undervaluing their peers.
> that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
Usually folks don't unionize until their work consistently fails to deliver good working conditions, so, yeah, in this case you do need to unionize to get that.
It's difficult to become a software engineer, but the job is relatively easy. It's not hard to become QA, or a fruit picker, or meat packer, but those jobs are fucking hard.
An equally soul draining job that requires you to service customers. And equally draining job that puts in physical danger. And equally draining job that takes out on long distance travel, like crewing a vessel.
I really doubt that a company is going to struggle to find people to load up a build of the game and try to clip through walls all day.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It is a little upsetting, but I can see OP's perspective given that some people actually pay for early alpha access ( I am still annoyed at myself for purchasing BG3 demo that will come.. who knows when ).
This weird disregard for someone else's time is oddly widespread.
It is not an honor. It is a job. If you want it to be done well, one should be compensated for it.
QA is a valuable skill set that is regularly underpaid and overworked. A good QA team makes or breaks a project, and there are plenty of examples of this in modern gaming.
Fuck “honor”, whatever the hell that means, and pay people what they are worth.
The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
>The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
I don't see how this would work. Somebody has to pay all the salaries, legal expenses, expensive equipment and software etc. Expecting people that want to work on video games to pull that kind of money out of pocket to fund a project that may or may not make any money is unreasonable. Nobody that wants to invest their money is going to give it to people who won't give them a return.
Most of the horror stories you are hearing from the gaming industry are coming from large multinational studios, many of which are struggling financially.
Just look at the most recent battlefield release or cyberpunk for examples of what happens when you don’t value QA.