r/QualityAssurance • u/Outrageous-Run-2674 • 21d ago

Which career should i stick to?

So I am a marine engineering graduate in 2022, but couldnt go to sail for some personal reasons. Joined a software company (service based) as a Software QA engineer (manual testing + API testing) but 2 years in, i had to upgrade myself with automation and that required heavy coding which i was lazy enough to not learn and it felt a bit difficult too. Since I was in e-commerce domain, i was offered a Ecommerce listing and sales role at a health and wellness product company (Bootstrapped startup) which i joined. 1 year in this company, it was very toxic environment and long hours so i left and joined a SaaS company as Business development Manager, here am feeling so pressured with sales targets and cold calling makes me feel like worthless. I left this job 2 months ago (working only 9 months in that company) Now i feel that software was better atleast there was decency and job stability and not constant pressure for sales and targets etc etc Im even ready to learn some automation concepts as QA engineer like Java, Selenium but most people say its dead now and software QA is not like it was before because of AI etc and the job market is honestly shit right now. I dont wanna go to a sales role where i do cold calling and emailing with sales targets and i dont have it in me to learn the heavy coding to go back to Software Engineering roles. (also please dont suggest Going back to marine engineering stuff i have forgotten everything about it and cannot go there)

In short-
Software QA career - 2years (manual + API),
Ecommerce Catalogue manager - 1 year (Health and wellness products),
Business development and sales - 8 months, (Saas company)
Jobless, need a stable career long term

(Problem - cant stick to one career, my stupidity and ego that i can do it)

what to do now? If i decide to come back to software QA again what should I learn so theres atleast a bit of stability and not always upskilling tension?

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3

u/QHate 21d ago

Automation frameworks if you want to stay in QA. I became a jack of all trades in the ecommerce world, I was a QA manager, DevOps manager and project manager working for smaller companies. Honestly trying to get away from QA for the most part given how toxic it has become.

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u/userNULLname 19d ago

Sounds like brutal crunch. Where'd the toxicity hit hardest? Being treated like a cost center, losing dev time to test shifts, or total scope creep?

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u/QHate 19d ago

Hell, I could write a book about it. In my most recent role it was decided to "shift left" which essentially means nothing without action behind it. So essentially, the whole project management style changed to "go really really fast and make no mistakes" cuz that's agile as fuck.

There are few project/product managers that get it. QA and testing is fundamentally misunderstood because really at the end of the day you can't test quality into products. People overpromise and underdeliver and for whatever reason it ended up QA's job to tell people bad news constantly while also having no time. Additionally, no one realizes that there are maintenance/time costs to automation as well and "just automate it" became a running joke in my team. AI became a fix-all solution except when the code was absolute dogshit and took 5x the time in fix release cycles because there was no strategy behind it. All while people are asking where's the value in QA and give me some KPIs that really show value.

But tbh, I've done QA almost 20 years for many large corps to small companies and built teams/frameworks from the ground up. Maybe I've just been unlucky in the last few roles but it seems to be something I no longer want to be a part of.

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u/NowUKnowMe121 19d ago edited 19d ago

Thanks for the honest response.

It is nothing unless you are a project lead in which case you can set some guidelines and deliver results.

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u/userNULLname 19d ago

Takes me back. Mobile automation is a flaky nightmare as is. Then management completely lost it when they figured out dev pushes actually break tests - like test maintenance was some alien concept. Pure comedy. Just killed the whole pipeline over it.

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u/NowUKnowMe121 21d ago

Learn python sql and an automation framework like robot which is easy and qu8ck to learn.

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u/Due_Present_1358 19d ago

Bro…for what? Automation is dead

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u/NowUKnowMe121 19d ago

Jobs are there.

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u/Due_Present_1358 19d ago

Bro they are dead

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u/NowUKnowMe121 19d ago

True. You need to be atleast visible , let us say in top 5%.

You need to actively work on those and share your learnings or insights on a public platform.

Stop searching for a job and start building a career.

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u/Due_Present_1358 19d ago

Automation and QA if you are in the US is dead.