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Comment by LatencyKills | Hacker News Reader

We have differing experiences, which shouldn't be surprising. My example explicitly referred to someone who was a good engineer who enjoyed the QA role.

This might have been an Apple/MS thing, but we always had very technical QA people on the dev tools team. For example, the QA lead for the C++ compiler had written their own compiler from scratch and was an amazing contributor.

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In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.

This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.

I spent most of my time working on Visual Studio (in the Boston time frame) so we got to interact with pretty much every team. I absolutely hated interacting with the Windows team. Everything was a fight for no reason.

As I said above, everyone has their own experiences but the QA folks I worked with at MS were fantastic.

Not sure if you're aware but Dave Plumber now has a really good YT channel [0] where he talks about MS back in those days. It's a fun walk down memory lane.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

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