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Comment by notsuoh | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t worked with QA people specifically and haven’t worked in an org that hired them specifically. Though I did consult with a large enterprise that had QA specific people, and they seemed to be doing mostly manual testing or some very limited automated testing started manually. Is this the norm for QA people?

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It depends on the project.

I'm a manual tester who's worked on many different projects. The larger ones have had a separate automation QA team.

On the smaller projects, I'll fetch the code base and suggest missing unit testcases to the developers.

Without writing a wall of text, I feel that dismissing the value of manual QA is like dismissing the value of a business analyst or project manager who doesn't write code.

My value comes from helping make sure the customer got what they wanted and it works - and I can do that without writing much code. But that's not to say I don't use tools and scripts to automate some of my work.

The vast majority of testers are manual testers. Testers with software development skills are used in the FAANGs and other segments where one pretty much has to be a developer in order to understand and write tests for the product but they're as expensive as a junior developer.

For one company I interact with it makes sense. It's a situation where they're taking several different software and hardware products and integrating them into a single stack that has even more variables of deployments in the field. What's more, the installations are all on site, not easily changed out due to security policies, and any downtime will impact revenue. Dedicated testing teams make sense that do a lot of manual testing makes sense.

That said I don't know if that situation is unique or the norm out in industry.

Depends on a system you are testing. It can be that it is sufficiently complex that the dreaded manual testing will require a lot of expertise and effort. People sometimes seem to generalize IT to developing/testing websites, due to it being most common area of work but it is not everything of course.

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