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Ask HN: Developers – would you ever consider becoming an SDET?

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Re: Ask HN: Developers – would you ever consider becoming an SDET?

#11

Post by grammernerd »

faet wrote: post #4

I was a software engineer at my previous job. I was mostly unhappy with the environment (lack of challenge). My friend was a recruiter at a company and was telling me about opportunities in said company. One of which was a SDET roll. At first I was hesitant, but it isn't 100% testing. Although, I enjoy the testing aspect. Tbh, the biggest thing was 'getting my foot in the door' and they paid to move me to a location…

Lack of agreed definition, for sure. The title 'SDET' in itself doesn't at all tell you enough about what a role is going to entail.

Re: Ask HN: Developers – would you ever consider becoming an SDET?

#12

Post by grammernerd »

poof131 wrote: post #5

Sounds like, “I’m looking for someone in the majors who is interested in switching to playing minor league ball.” If you had a fantastic developer who you could use to build new product that drives revenue or use them to write tests for the current product, which task would you put them on? Which task would your CEO want them on? Which task is going to get the most visibility in the company and offer the best opportu…

I think organizations make that kind of choice all the time. They take fantastic devs and make them leads and managers in the hope that it will have a multiplicative benefit on the business.

And they do devote resources to test - but by hiring testers. It might be great if a company could devote some of its devs to test, but I suspect the reason that they wouldn't is that the devs wouldn't want to.

I take the point about integrating Test and Dev, and probably it would need to lead by example from the Test side...

:) I do also take your point about what actually happens in the real world. This is the kind of response I was expecting - it's super helpful to see it articulated.

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