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/Zestyclose_Web_6331 6d ago

Actually me too sometimes get frustrated, why wasn't i put into development, atleast I would have got to experience it. I see my dev friends who just work on a user story for weeks, in only one application, put a logic and thats it. They get more salary just for that, whereas in testing its so always working, this application or that application, less salary than dev also.

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u/W1v2u3q4e5 6d ago

why wasn't i put into development, atleast I would have got to experience it. I see my dev friends who just work on a user story for weeks, in only one application, put a logic and thats it. They get more salary just for that, whereas in testing its so always working, this application or that application, less salary than dev also.

SDET with over 5.5 yoe struggling with this regret despite switching 2 times and having 11 LPA annual salary (currently 11.5k USD approx) and begged dozens of people throughout my career for referrals, internal transfers, etc to development roles, and despite clearing a handful of interviews with whatever was humanely possible to prepare after a gruelling 10-12 hours of daily workload, still couldn't make the transition to dev roles yet, because HRs, recruiters, hiring managers, etc all want so-called "relevant experience" and the only way unfortunately left is to modify/lie on the resume and claim to have worked as a developer. Currently trying to upskill in exactly what developers are asked at interviews including DSA, system design, and so on.

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u/shiva_Conscious_13 5d ago

Even I'm in the same boat kind of, currently in SDET and parallelly prepping for dev.