Had I known the stigma of belonging to the Test group of a company, I probably never would have become a Test Engineer. Now technically, what I do isn't what most Test Engineers do, and although that is my official title, I am closer to what would be called a Software Development Engineer in Test.
What amazes me is the attitude people have in regards to the skill set of Test Engineers. While I am not a guru in any of these languages, I have written production code in C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, SQL, and Labview. I have used (but again, am no master in) a broad array of technologies including SOAP (using Apache CXF), xmlrpc (using Apache ws-xmlrpc), Swing, SWT, some small Eclipse plugins, just to name a few. So although my knowledge isn't necessarily deep, it is broad.
When I first got to my new job, I was talking with one of the developers. I mentioned that at my previous job, I was a developer. He looked at me quizzically and said, "so you demoted yourself to a Test Engineer?". I had a puzzled look as well, because I had never been a Test Engineer, nor had I worked for a Test department before. Over time however, I grew to understand why such denigrating attitudes exist, and I will explore them in later blogs.
Nevertheless, I essentially had to prove that I could indeed program and even design relatively large scale projects by myself. Developers seem aghast when during code reviews I point out things that seem to surprise them. For example, code paths that they forgot to free a malloc'ed pointer to, or why you shouldn't write 1000 line functions (and god-forbid that they cut-and-paste a function from somewhere else). They also seem aghast when I counter their feeble argument that breaking down too many functions into sub-functions would cause overhead by telling them to A) profile it and B) inline their functions.
Still, there is some truth to the notion that many Test Engineers are not all that technically savvy, and so I don't blame developers for thinking that at least some Test Engineers are technically deficient. And this realization has made me determined to NOT be a Test Engineer again.
Just to relate one last story, I knew another Test Engineer who had to call someone at a company in order to purchase a product of theirs that would be utilized by their test framework. After some discussion, the sales rep basically asked to speak to the developers in charge, or someone who knew what this framework really did. The great irony was that the test framework was designed and programmed by the very Test Engineer the sales rep was talking to.
Test Engineers....we get no respect.
Hi Sean,
ReplyDeleteI was a developer for 15 years, but I burned out after the .com crash and ended up a test guy. I have been a test guy for over ten years now. It is a fact of life that in most companies, you will get less respect and less recognition than a talented developer will. On the other hand, it's a lower-stress job, and if you're good at it, it's just as secure and nearly as lucrative as a developer job. And of course, there are always opportunities to program on the side.
It sounds as if you were unhappy with your job when you wrote this article. May I offer you some advice? Keep advancing your technical skills, and keep practicing your writing. You never know where your career is going to take you, but the more you have to offer, the broader your options.
Best of luck to you,
Bill Smith
P.S. There are some bright people hanging out at the Area 51 QA site (http://sqa.stackexchange.com/).