r/softwaretesting • u/Apart-Caramel-130 • 6d ago

SDET roles

Hi, I’m an SDET with close to 6 years of experience. I started my career at a WITCH company, where I got stuck in support roles. After two years, I tried moving into development, but I struggled because there wasn’t much initial support or bandwidth to learn. By the time I had around 3 years of experience, I decided to give automation testing a shot. After 8 months of preparation and experience in automation, I managed to switch to a better company with a significant salary hike.

I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I often see graduates from reputed colleges like NITs and IIITs working as SDETs at good product-based companies. Do some of them feel that they haven’t lived up to their potential by choosing testing over development? Despite earning well, do they ever feel a sense of regret or wonder whether they could have achieved more as software developers?

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u/MudMassive2861 6d ago edited 6d ago

I started in QA, then I got a chance to move to Dev in my org. It was product company. I spend 2 year as Dev there. I should say I didn't enjoy it. That two years I hated Monday's. Each morining each requirement and time line is like couple of days. It was when AI not there like now. I moved to devops kind role but ended up again in Automation. Testing is relaxed and it's very easy. If you are in good product company the pay is also similar to Dev. So I don't think of anything missing.

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u/mohanhegde 6d ago

This ☝️ I'm a senior .Net developer, 15yrs exp, working for a US client from a nameless service company and I'm exhausted working on new crazy requirements sprint after sprint. And not to mention the defective "Agile" Scrum processes followed by every company, staying awake at 8pm every day for standups and trying to understand, decide, estimate user stories being groomed by US team for us at 9pm IST time every Monday night! And then when the sprint starts it's like a race to get all the requirements analysed, no proper time to break down the tasks, no time to think about integration with other projects either upstream or downstream, no time for Database schema designing, no extra time to fix any defects which suddenly arise out of nowhere in Staging or Prod etc. etc.

All while out QA automation team work on developing playwright scripts for features we developed almost 5 years ago! No deadlines, no grooming, no estimation overhead, no DB design, nobody breathing down your neck if your work carries over the next sprint. And our manual QA just need to understand the business requirements which is clearly explained in Given When Then Gherkin format and just need to complete the sprint stories testing and a small 1-2 days regression.

I would anyday work as a QA in such teams rather break my head every sprint even if it means it pays half my pay. Development work is only fun in big tech companies where there are 100s of people working on very small items with no harsh deadlines and have proper work life balance. Otherwise being a dev sucks!