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Comment by paradox460 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a manager and a QA I once knew. QA was a nice guy, but a terrible QA. Would fail stories on the most arbitrary guidelines. Story is about changing the font size on the home page? He'd fail it because he wasn't able to log in (he tested while the auth service was undergoing planned maintenance).

Manager loved this guy, and pushed him through several promotions. Eventually other employees got tired of being skipped for promotions and left the company, creating a minor staffing crisis

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We kinda have this, but… At least we have a dedicated QA team. That spends their whole day literally just confirming that the shit we write is up to spec. We spend a lot of time resolving discrepancies between implementation, spec and test, but when things roll out the other end, they work.

yeah a good qa team is peace of mind.

I think just about everybody has had to deal with one or several of these guys.

> Story is about changing the font size on the home page? He'd fail it because he wasn't able to log in (he tested while the auth service was undergoing planned maintenance).

Average offshore QA team.

This guy had offshore mentally but sat 3 desks away from me

Much as cancer arises and grows from natural cellular processes gone awry, this seems to be an organizational cancer, present in any company of a large enough size.

Then the other employees found that this is how the world works: don't promote people that deliver results or you may have to replace them.

Well, I seen a fair share of "blind" programmers who just did their (very limited) scope, perhaps they did it well... yet the whole tool just didnt work and nobody cared.

I imagine that if the guy pointed out things like this - he wasnt popular with the developmemt team, but popular with management and users.

people get promoted based upon their ability to conform to management culture, and their ability to deliver outcomes; in most places the former is far more important than the latter but not always

the former is often easier to measure than the latter, and the latter is often only measurable when superficial.

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