And you have no idea how it is to be a software test engineer when the company has to do their releases usually at 10pm at night because that's when their customers are offline and not using the software application for work. A lot of software companies are doing this "edgy" concept called "Agile". Meaning that every 2-3 weeks depending on the software company, has to do releases that improve the software that their customers use. As a tester , we have to stay there and test the entire software application whenever there is a release.Making sure that any new features or bug fixes don't break another part of the application. A good rollout is that we are done by 2 or 3am in the morning. However there is rarely a flawless rollout, and if a problem is found during the release, the programmer who worked on that must come into work or work remotely from home to fix the program at 2 am in the morning. Then the test team has to wait till that problem is fixed and retest everything from scratch. Then in order for software companies to stay ahead or up with their competition they need to constantly improve and add more features. The sales department and marketing departments think that when a new feature is planed to be released that it will be released on that specific date, therefore they pre-sell all these new features to their customers and disregard the planning phase of the software team. Sometimes things will pop up that will delay the release of a certain product but to meet their deadline that the sales team promised the customers this means working longer hours. It was common for my first job to work the 9-2pm on the release days and then come back to work around 8pm and do the roll out till whenever it was finished. This happened usually once every other week till 5am or even 9am in the morning to release improvements for the software application the clients used. Then you have the customers, and each customer wants customized preferences and if they are a big customer, then those customization's will be made for them , thus making the software application even more complex to test. Then you have programers who like to slip in a "tiny" code change without telling the test team and usually the test team ends up finding out when that tiny code change end's up bringing down an entire section of the application. Not saying that teachers don't work hard but every job has it's pros and cons and we all could bitch about our jobs if we like. Then another aspect is the company I worked at was a CRM company and the customers who would call and complain had very little knowledge of technologies and I worked with the 3rd party vendors who would be difficult to work with because they wouldn't want to help me out on testing certain bugs before we released them due to security purposes, even though they were partners with the company I worked for. The company I worked at is a very sucessfull company but it was not common for all the employees to work 50-60 hour work weeks if not more than that. As a result a lot of people would end up quitting because breaking it down to the hourly rate vs the annual salary it was not worth it. Dealing with customers that are pissed off because they don't understand how the software application works and want something done a specific way is pretty similar to dealing with parents of students. I saw many people in tech support also break down in tears due to the verbal abuse they constantly received by the customer , because they took it out on them and were upset that the software application was not designed to what they wanted it to do. I worked in tech support at this company before becoming a tester there. It was brutal as well. And this company only had 10days pto/sick time . So I just don't like to hear it whenever teachers complalin about being underpaid , etc, because there are TONS of jobs out there that the workers are treated just as bad and dont even get benefits or anywhere near as much time off as teachers can get. I just don't like it when one person thinks their job is more important than other jobs and they bitch about their salary when there are a lot of other jobs out there that are worse than being a teacher. Just like how breast cancer gets all the attention now a days, there are thousands of other people who die from other forms of cancer yet breast cancers is the cancer that is most often brought up.