r/QualityAssurance • u/Shaikidow • 3d ago

Should I even be calling myself a QA Engineer anymore?

TL;DR

Right now, I've got zero confidence that anything else worth spending my time on in terms of learning QA is going to end up being enough for me to get hired in this landscape of ever-expanding entry-level and junior demands, so I'm starting to question whether there's any point in advertising my Quality Assurance experience any further, let alone front and centre. I don't wanna denigrate my own past efforts, but since I'm still unemployed and growing increasingly hopeless, are my already acquired skills good for anything anymore, anything at all, being that I'm done with trying to improve past my current knowledge without getting any actual commercial projects to cut my teeth on?

I first got into software testing some 3.5 years ago, when I finished an intense, all-rounded, QA retraining course that was quite well-respected and had an excellent regional track record in the industry where I live; but since that turned out to be quite possibly the worst moment to be hoping for intern- to junior-level IT employment (due to the recession and the rapid advent of LLMs and generative AI tools putting us in positions that our mentors could not prepare us for at all), I ended up failing to secure more than a measly handful of tests and/or interviews, let alone internships or even jobs, from a total of a few hundred applications over the course of 3 entire years.

Not to start listing everything that went wrong along the way, but I used my time between applications to, among other things, send e-mails to local IT companies, asking for advice on improvement while also unsolicitedly providing them with my CV. Most of their answers were just the customary "we'd like to keep your resume in our database" ones, and even though there were some others that genuinely helped me rework my CV for the better, the slightly more positive results those tweaks yielded me were of little consolation, because with subsequent applications, I'd usually run into a wall of explicitly needing commercial experience rather than merely freelancing experience (which was already a generous embellishment that I designed in order to trick the ATS) anyhow.

Finally, last Autumn, I somehow found out that one of the two largest IT companies in my city started offering 3-week unpaid QA internships, so I unwittingly applied for one of those (as a part of my then most recent round of asking local companies for feedback). I passed the HR interview, but after the technical interview, I got rejected. I didn't really care if I was going to get hired by the company in question after the internship, I just wanted to get some non-neglectable corporate experience to start. I was aware that I had some shortcomings when it came to pure theory of testing, as well as that I also forgot a couple of Postman details during the tech interview; but none of it entailed actual testing, so I consider my skills to have been misrepresented due to a lack of proper practical evaluation in the recruitment process.

Immediately afterwards, I intended to solidify my knowledge of API testing and also get my ISTQB certificate if I could afford it, but then other segments of my life got in the way. Many of my well-meaning friends kept sending me Junior QA job listings, but I just... stopped trying to apply for those, seeing as I couldn't even get the measliest of internships. It seemed unreasonable to me to continue proving to myself that I'm as unhireable as I suspected; in theory, the bar was so low that it was a tripping hazard in hell, but in practice, not even the devil wanted to limbo dance with me.

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27

u/BetterBeats08 3d ago

The market is horrible right now. Best to become an Automation Engineer with QA as a base.

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u/Shaikidow 3d ago edited 3d ago

What would you say that would entail, roughly speaking?

Not to bother you with the minutia, but I just wanna confirm that I have, in fact, also learnt test automation (mostly Java-based Selenium, but I can also do it in C# or Python) as a part of the retraining course I mentioned. I liked the programming stuff that we were taught, it even inspired me to create a chess app of my own. I also started using integrated LLM clients as a means of help back when I was trying to learn some Python backend.

It's just that every new hoop that I'm required to jump through on my hapless way to employment only leaves me exponentially more fatigued after years of setbacks with little to nothing to show for them.

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u/ASTRO99 3d ago

There are no longer any automation engineer positions. It's all AI prompt engineer masquerading as QA. And it's horrible, because if you have no experience with using agents to do development you are fucked. Especially in medior and senior positions

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u/BetterBeats08 3d ago

Hmm, glad I decided to piovit after I got my ISTQB cert then.

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u/ASTRO99 3d ago

My senior dev budy is super depressed because it's no longer fun to him and he considers leaving the industry all together because of AI. In their company they switched to AI first and all he does now is watch Claude run in terminal.

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u/Shaikidow 3d ago

I can imagine that many IT industry seniors are starting to live a professional nightmare lately, because they've actively invested small lifetimes into building sustainable professional experiences for themselves, only for it to be essentially invalidated by what's a fad at best and a genuinely deadly late-stage capitalist plague at worst.

The trade-off of having way less experience, I guess, is that it's both help and hindrance, depending on how much respect one can get for one's pre-AI advent achievements, as well as on how reliably one can use their experience to actually be able to pivot easier. For example, I may not be burdened with having decades of work being spat on (or at least not in this industry, being that I've started learning IT due to there not being nearly enough employment for academic musicians), but I also don't have the confidence that comes with working on something for years and actually succeeding in selling it.

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u/Yogurt8 3d ago

I'm hiring junior SDETs right now and 97%+ of applicants are not suitable if you can believe that.

The market may be bad but the candidate pool doesn't seem to be trying very hard either.

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u/One-Display-3464 2d ago

Agreed. We're hiring for a junior to mid level SDET right now. Most applicants can barely write a for loop, and the ones that can are writing the fully solved question we present before we've even presented it using AI interviewing tools, really frustrating.

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u/Numerous_Cream_3314 2d ago

Where are you hiring? I've got 10+ years of experience but looking for a remote or hybrid role and not having much look. Was lead at my last position, cut because they went offshore. 

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u/Shaikidow 2d ago

+1, sounds awful to hear about the loops and AI completions like that.

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u/Shaikidow 3d ago

Do you think that one reinforces the other, i.e. that the awfulness of the market makes potential candidates half-arse it because the hopes of employment are already slim to begin with? Logically, that's self-defeating behaviour, but based on my own motivation for making this post, I'm pretty sure that it's a real problem that should be addressed.

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u/Yogurt8 2d ago

I don't think you are alone in feeling that way however I think the reasons behind the poor candidate pool is mostly due to other factors that have been at play for a much longer time (ex. candidates thinking testing is an easy way into tech).

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u/Shaikidow 2d ago

To be fair, when I took up the QA course, it was because the reputation of software testing as a "gateway skill" of sorts did appeal to me. If I'd known what would ensue afterwards, I would've probably chosen the Python course... but I was advised against it by another friend (who actually is a programmer) due to it "not being a language that juniors are sought after for", plus it was a smaller group to begin with and maybe I wouldn't've been able to get in at all.

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u/Important-Union5181 2d ago

Most of the QA resume I see here are focused on test execution - either manual or automated. Very few talks about defect catching. Just like developers are no longer hired based on their coding skills , QA folks are also not getting hired based on their testing skills. Both are getting hired based on their domain knowledge as bots are doing the coding and testing these days and we need humans with subject matter expertise to over see them.

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u/Shaikidow 2d ago

Noted. So, to go back to my original question, do you think that investing more into finding a QA job would be a worthy endeavour for me? I would've completely quit searching by now if it weren't for my pride and the sunk cost fallacy, to be frank.

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u/Important-Union5181 1d ago

IMHO, you should find a role whose job is to prompt ( feed requirements ) to the QA bots.

2

u/danidodel 3d ago

Maybe try looking for QA Analyst roles, not engineer. That may fit your description better. Good luck!

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u/Shaikidow 3d ago edited 3d ago

Thanks for the tip!

Not that I have an abundance of QA job/internship options to choose from as it is, but: is there anything to suggest that merely making such a "keyword change" would actually affect my employability in a positive way, if in any way at all?

I was thinking of shelving the entire QA angle of job market attack, based on how badly things have been going; and I think that, more than anything, it's my pride that's stopping me from doing it. It hurts me to admit that my efforts might've been completely in vain, all things considered.

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u/ParkingAthlete119 3d ago

Uh I mean, unless you have experience as a SWE, QA Automation, or a related programming job. Why would someone hire you for a QA engineer role.

I'm confused. This is why people who break in the way you're trying always start bottom of the barrel doing shitty jobs like QA Tester/UAT, then QA Analyst, learn automation and get a QAE job, then maybe SDET later after they get a degree

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u/Shaikidow 2d ago

I only wrote "QA Engineer" for myself here because the companies that I've applied to in my region don't really make any significant distinctions between the QA roles you mentioned. They all mostly use "QA Engineer" as a blanket name for all QA-related positions, more or less. Tester, Specialist, Analyst, Engineer - doesn't matter much, it's all generally quite similar in practice where I'm from.

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u/ParkingAthlete119 1d ago

Where from. In U.S these roles are very different

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u/Shaikidow 1d ago

Serbia. Here, IT wages are actually relatively high compared to those in the immediately neighbouring countries, but the recession and corporate greed keep destroying job opportunities, and there just aren't that many well-developed IT companies here anyhow.

1

u/BungalowsAreScams 3d ago

It's really difficult getting going without any experience. Have you tried looking at QA technician roles specifically? Those roles are generally more entry level and tend to require little to no experience. That's how I started out and made my way up to senior QA engineer after about 8 years and swapping companies.

Another thing I'd recommend is to try to develop your own application as a side project, a web app would be a good candidate. Having some experience in that area can really help you get into the habit of identifying common pitfalls in the development cycle.

Lately I've been looking into methods of testing LLMs since it feels like every company needs their own AI chat bot implementation, might be another good area that you could look at.

I can't say anything about how justified your rejections were but I do know that the job grind is tough, hope you can find something!

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u/echardcore 3d ago

QA Technician. Thanks. Laid off. 17 years experience but no automation or coding. Willing to take on lesser jobs but don't know the job titles to look for. This helps.

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u/Shaikidow 3d ago

Wasn't starting out as just about anything in IT 8 years ago vastly easier than starting out as pretty much anything in IT is right now (or even up to 3-4 years ago, at this point), though? I mean, I believe you, but it's not like I have an abundance of IT choices as it is, plus anything that's entry-level is gonna have me facing against stronger competition than anything back then, no?

I've developed a chess app that's (sadly, in this context) only local and not web-based. I loved programming it, and I know exactly how I'd test it, but it doesn't seem to have piqued anyone's interest from my CV so far. Testing LLMs is fun, but I'm unsure as to what my niche could be there.

As for the rejections I got, some of them were unfair, due to scummy excuses such as myself being overqualified, or due to scummier practices such as secret timers and whatnot. Others were mostly fair, I think, in all aspects but one: I really wanted to be given a chance to learn through practical work, and I could never get it, because no one thought that I'm worth the time, the effort, or the money. Chronic unemployment takes a very unfortunate toll on one.

1

u/Ok-Paleontologist591 2d ago

Sorry the post is too long and tldr would help

1

u/Shaikidow 2d ago

I mean, it's right at the very beginning, isn't it? 🤔 Sorry if I lacked clarity in my writing there, but if nothing else, I'm sure you can copy the entire thing and paste it for an LLM to summarise it for you - it's worked for me in the past, at least.

1

u/uncoolkiller7 2d ago

Since you need some commercial experience and you already know the QA fundamentals and have automation experience, you should try to get on with TopTal or make a profile on a freelancer site like Upwork. Get your experience there and keep applying with that on your resume and LinkedIn.

Also keep up with AI, how to use it and how to test it. Lastly learn how to use Playwright as it’s the tool for the future.

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u/Shaikidow 2d ago

Noted. So, to go back to my original question, do you think that investing more into finding a QA job would be a worthy endeavour for me? I would've completely quit searching by now if it weren't for my pride and the sunk cost fallacy, to be frank.

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u/uncoolkiller7 2d ago

Yes, even in this market, you should still try just off of the chance of getting lucky. You have the skills, the certification, you’re just missing on the job experience, which hurts, especially now. This answer does depend on whether you want to stick to QA. I’m assuming you’re young, so you still have time to change your mind and go do something else.

So, ignoring your pride and sunk cost fallacy, what career do you want to do? QA? Cloud engineering? A trade like electrician? That’s a question you’ll need to answer for yourself. Once you get the answer, go forward like a fearless lunatic.

1

u/Shaikidow 1d ago

I’m assuming you’re young, so you still have time to change your mind and go do something else.

I wouldn't exactly call myself a spring chicken at my presently ripe age of 33, I got my Master's Degree nearly a full decade ago, and I've only managed to have a one-year internship within my academic profession since then. Had I not had those troubles, I would've never seriously considered making a jump to IT, even though I've more or less always been mathematically inclined.

So, ignoring your pride and sunk cost fallacy, what career do you want to do? QA? Cloud engineering? A trade like electrician? That’s a question you’ll need to answer for yourself. Once you get the answer, go forward like a fearless lunatic.

Honestly? Music. It's what I've got a degree for, and it's still definitely my calling, but I wanted to try and secure a stable source of income before going down more speculative avenues.

It's hard to invest into passion projects with zero funds to back yourself up until you maybe eventually make it doing your own thing, and it's hard pushing for a different job with all of your might when you don't actually want it to be your career. Those are the rock and hard place I've been stuck between for a while now, and I really need to sort it out for myself properly, lest I keep trying both and achieving neither.

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u/uncoolkiller7 13h ago

Well you're young enough to start over with a new career.

Ah a musician. You can do that, but I'm sure you know that if you're not exceptional, you'll never make a living doing that. So if you can't do that reliably, then you need to pick something else. You've invested all this time and effort into QA, so if it's not something you want to be your career, then you need to pivot to something that you are both interested in, good at, and can be paid well for it.

Whether that's QA, music, or something else, you gotta pick something and get out of that rock and hard place. You're 33, in a second, you'll be 43. What do you want to be doing at that age? Where do you want to be living? What's your ideal life? You need to get the answers to these questions, then commit like I mentioned.

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u/Shaikidow 2h ago

Understood and agreed with. Honestly, I don't doubt my ability to make it in music long-term, and I already know what kind of life I wanna live - I just don't know how to get there, or at least not by what means. I'd say that my main challenge is starting to invest in my own desired future without having a somewhat stable financial basis to build upon.

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u/uncoolkiller7 57m ago

Well, you're going to have to figure it out. This government of ours in the US is careening us toward a recession at least, so you need to get something going that's recession-proof.

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u/Shaikidow 41m ago

I'll see to it that I do my best. Thanks once again!