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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

There’s definitely a bimodal distribution of QA people for capability. The good ones are great. The bad ones infuriating.

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The lack of respect and commensurate compensation at a lot of companies doesn't help. QA is often viewed as something requiring less talent and often offshored which layers communication barriers on top of everything. I've met QA people with decent engineering skills that end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice. Tell them a proposed change and they'll point out how it could go wrong or cause issues from a customer perspective.

This 100%

Companies think QA is shit, so they hire shit QA, and they get shit QA results.

Then they get rid of QA, and then the devs get pissed because now support and dev has turned to QA and customers are wondering how the hell certain bugs got out the door.

Yeah and then we started expecting them to code. Which has not gone well. And the thing is if you have the suspicious mind of a top rate QA person and you can code well, you’re already 2/3 of the way to being a security consultant or a Red Shirt engineer and doubling your salary.

This is why your duty in engineering is to drag QA into every specification conversation as early as possible so that they can display that body of knowledge.

Yes. The best QA people are gold. Infuriating at times, but gold.

> end up having the most knowledge about the application works in practice

The best I've worked with had this quality, and were fearless advocates for the end-user. They kept everyone honest.

I was at a company once where they were talking about trying to do a rewrite of an existing tool because the original engineers were gone. But the requirements docs were insufficient to reach feature parity, so they weren’t sure how to proceed. Once I got the QA lead talking they realized he had the entire spec in his head. Complete with corner cases.

The problem is usually in the company culture and hiring process.

Are the QA people & team treated like partners, first class citizens, and screened well the way you would an SWE?

Or are they treated like inferior replaceable cogs, resourced from a 3rd party consulting body shop with high turnover?

You get what you hire for.

We hired a guy with an English Lit degree as QA. He was super smart, and really self-motivated. He learned full-stack dev, and wrote a fcking amazing dashboard and test config wizard in like half a year. (This was before AI)

People at that point were complaining about tests being hard to run for YEARS.

He then left for a dev role at another company in a short time.

And “they had huge impact & left quickly” is actually a good outcome right!

Better than underhiring to set the whole endeavor up for failure

Why would you upskill as a QA when you can become a dev? Every single QA person I know only became a QA as a stepping stone. That's now it's seen.

Companies don't care about QA, so of course you don't see any QA wizards anymore.

Necessary but insufficient. On several projects where I was the lead I started honoring the QA lead's attempts at vetoing a release. I was willing to explain why I thought changes we had made answered any concerns that QA had, or did not, but if the lead said No then I wasn't going to push a release.

If you're consistent about it, you can restore a sizable chunk of power to the QA team, just by respecting that No. With three people 'in charge' of the project instead of two, you get restoration of Checks and Balances. Once in a while Product and QA came to me to ask us to stop some nonsense. Occasionally Product and Dev wanted to know why things were slipping past QA. But 2/3rds of the interventions were QA and Dev telling Product to knock something off because it was destroying Quality and/or morale.

God do I miss QA and being able to go 2 against one versus the person whose job description requires them to be good at arguing for bullshit.

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