Has anyone else noticed that a lot of entire QA teams have been made redundant/ let go over the last year or so? Me and Jules Ludlow noticed this a while back and don't understand it. Does anyone know why this might be? 🤔 It seems strange - QA is a very important, if not the most important, part of the development lifecycle, and especially in certain industries where poor QA and QC could cost more than just money, but lives 😱 #recruitment #hiring #redundancies #tech #QA #QC #rebelrecruiters
We're always the first to go, developers produce something tangible, thats sellable and easy to visualise. Quality is harder to visualise, we don't produce something that you can take to market what we do is improve rather than produce. Basically a company can sell the work a developer produces on its own, you can't do that with just testers
Many companies are merging the QA role into the Developer role...
Completely agree with you Mica (Meesha) Bell 🔔, QA is an essential part of the development lifecycle, and quality needs to be built in. It also affects the bottom line and I agree that poor/rushed QA affects lives, not just money
A lot of companies still don't see the need for a QA team, madness I know!
Constantly pushing for automation testers and sidelining the value of manual testers has also fed into this problem in my opinion. Automation has its place in regression tests but functional testing is about so much more. In this post dev ops world our perceived value seems to have dwindled further. A few people have already mentioned this but it's difficult to see value in what we do because we don't output a product. Organisations still haven't caught on to the value we add and many will silo their testers so they aren't able to offer the full value of their skill set either. A big reason I love where I work is that I have exposure to new teams across new projects, and in working with them I learn how new systems work, and the teams in turn learn how to test smaller updates to the product as a byproduct of working with a seasoned manual tester. This value then goes on way past the project end date by those teams still regularly using verification tools that I created (such as spreadsheet formulae) to assist my own testing during a project. Our value is seen by those who work closely with us but more often than not, QA is as a tick box for higher ups. It's a shame really but it's a cycle.. in time it'll come back around.
I've only ever been part of one redundancy in my career, and that was this Christmas gone, the whole team went - FE, BE, QA, Mobile. I did get a feeling though that they are trying to integrate QA into Engineering roles. Which I found astonishing going by what our QA team were doing. I helped out with testing builds, going through regression packs etc... The work that the QA put in to setup all the stories to test, not to mention the automation work they did. There is no way that our Engineers would do that work, it's just outside of our scope. It's almost like specialists are not required in any field. I really hope it's not a trend that continues, because an expert QA is worth their weight in gold in supporting Engineers.
I've noticed this trend as well, and it's quite concerning. QA is crucial for ensuring product quality and safety, especially in high-stakes industries. While automation and shift-left testing are valuable, they cannot fully replace the expertise and oversight provided by dedicated QA professionals. It's important for companies to balance cost-saving measures with the need for robust QA to avoid significant risks down the line.
Could it be that for many years recruiters have also undervalued testing, and chosen to reinforce the vender view that automation is the only answer that matters? Now that automation can be dev sourced or AI-driven, people have lost the value of testing mentality. You reap what you sow.
Sadly most startups when they need to make cuts view these expenses as easily removable, because the whole (X is buggy / flaky), quality argument is an arguable one to investors.
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6moAs others have said, QA is merging in as a dev responsibility, and as part of TDD. I've had a LOT of offshore outsourcing companies approach me in the last few months offering QA.