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Comment by tashoecraft | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you haven’t had a good PM or a job that supports having one.

Saying it’s often some new grad is like saying there’s no point having an on shore dev team because the devs are often fresh out of university. If you continually hire terribly you’re going to have a bad result.

A PM should become the subject matter expert in the product they are developing. They should be able to field questions on most every part of it, and be able to build a roadmap of features. Communicate with all teams associated with it. Having the programmers plan all features is a recipe for disaster if your product isn’t designed for developers. It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it.

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I can most certainly and confidently tell you that a dedicated QA team that only does testing is a total waste of money! A sre/platform team building fuzzy testing tools and mandating better testing practices is money much better spent.

The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me.

If your devs can't think of handling nulls or corner cases, you got a skill problem, and you should ASAP upskill the devs, not outsource thinking to another tea.

Making quality somebody else's problem is the exact opposite of ownership! You want agile? Damn leave the devs alone, stop building walls around them and the product they are building!

>The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me.

As a former quality-focused dev, I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club. There is always somebody above you who cares only about their own career ambitions and has more leverage than you do. This leads to a horde of devs who just do what they're told and not much else.

Businesses are all about risk management. The safest way to de-risk a business is to water down ownership, at the cost of injuring quality-focused devs. You're only a cog. You need to only be a cog to them. They must to be able to replace you with another cog when you leave for greener pastures.

  > I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club.

yep, i can say i've seen this over and over; more than anything incentives are for the next okr or whatever to be completed so they can move on to the next one asap.

i've seen pr's sent out for review that literally didn't work or crashed immediately on use... as if the expectation is qa will report whatever needs fixing but thats fine cause its "in qa now" so development is "done".

That’s just Goodhart’s law.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

I don't disagree with you, I've seen the same (a lot) but you can still go to another company that prioritizes quality a little more.

Definitely can take a while to find one though, that much is true.

> advocating for better <topic of choice> is money much better spent

That seems like a very Bay Area mindset - advocacy is more lauded than doing something.

Fair enough!

I used "advocating" loosely here. I hate the "advocate a lot, build nothing" mindset myself, and I am not a fan of the Bay Area and its practices (to put it mildly), so I edited my post.

What I mean is devs making tools for devs, resulting in better overall quality.

Sorry, that was a bit to snarky. While I don’t agree with not having dedicated QA, I completely agree with devs being responsible for the quality of their area and adjacent areas.

In my experience good test engineering teams can focus on having a more global view of systems while not being biased by implementation details.

You are so right on the QA thing and so wrong on the PM thing. If you have a PM that just came out of uni, your company has no idea what they are doing. Good PM's are really really good at communicating at multiple abstraction levels within multiple levels of the organizational hierarchy. Why? Because they have to build consensus and coalitions to get the things ( money, people, buy-in, details, information ) required to build really good software and build all the ancillary things to sell and support that software. I think what you are calling a PM is what I call a jr. project manager.

>It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it.

Strangely enough, that's happening at a few companies (run by Amazon refugees IIRC) where they think that making devs do QA and removing QA/QE roles will speed delivery. I'm in one of those companies now, and I'm waiting for the #FAFO loop to happen.

That really depends on what does QA entail at these companies. If it's just increasing test coverage and adding integration tests then yes, devs should be doing it.

If it's just clicking UIs all day long then obviously a QA should do it. Or have an UAT environment where a few more enthusiastic customers are willing to test and report bugs.

It's more than that. In an org with an architecture of silo'd teams that all work on their own independent federated services, you'll need people to test out all of the variations on content, timing and error handling for the software as a whole. Depending on automated testing to handle all of that, in a live environment, is a fool's errand no matter how much it makes the development cycle seem to go faster.

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