How hard to get a QA job with no experience?

Main problems:

  • Extremely hard to get impactful work as a QA as you basically have to write the testing framework to get something good. If you come in late to a project you can be FUBAR as automation through the likes of BDD is intended to make testing easy enough that a manual tester can write out test cases in text files. *Devs are usually responsible for unit, integration and component testing which leaves you with testing that is hard to automate and most likely manual. If you do want to automate stuff that is difficult to automate, speaking from experience you will usually find that there is little to no documentation on it, not much learning on stackoverflow and the other testers are usually clueless (if you are on a testing team)
  • High amount of bait and switch into manual testing roles
  • If you are stuck on a testing team this means that you will have little to no contact with devs which means that the more time you spend here the less able you are to compete with with an swe on knowledge
  • In high pressure environments, testers can become scapegoats
  • Management values feature work so QA so in downturns they will let the testers go first
/r/cscareerquestions Thread