Why I Switched my day work from Programming to Automated Testing? Part 4: Better Career(s)

Brighter future after mastering real Test Automation and Continuous Testing as a programmer or tester.

A repost of my past article on Medium in 2022.

The articles in this series

• More Challenging

• More Fun

• Too productive to continue working as a programmer

• Better Career(s)

Recently, I saw this insightful post on my LinkedIn Feed.

Image Credit: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/influencer-club_this-is-so-true-follow-us-influencer-activity-6957379061358686208-1sV0/?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

I would change the “human being” in the above answer to “Software Engineer in Test”, and the rest remains valid!

Table of Contents:
· In (huge) Demand
· Little (real) Competition
· Wide Applicability 
· Stable Skillset
· Still being highly creative
· High Respect at Top Companies
· Easier to make a name
· Develop your own Apps

In (huge) Demand

All hot buzzwords in the software industry, such as Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, and Release Early Release Often, are related to automated software testing. More releases → much testing effort required. In several recent software projects I consulted, I found the number of testers exceeded that of the programmers, commonly 1.5 times.

However, I would point out that the release cycle was ~3 months for those software projects. Can you imagine the test effort for ‘Facebook is released twice a day”?

“Facebook is released twice a day, and keeping up this pace is at the heart of our culture. With this release pace, automated testing with Selenium is crucial to making sure everything works before being released.” — DAMIEN SERENI, Engineering Director at Facebook, at Selenium 2013 conference.

The answer to meeting the ever-growing testing demand is Automated End-to-End Testing.

Little (real) Competition

How does one become a programmer? It typically takes three or four years of university education. What about automated testers? I used to work at two universities, and my daughter graduated from university last year, I can tell you there are virtually no university courses on Automated End-to-End-Testing or Continuous Testing.

Of course, there might be exceptions, an associate professor used my book “Practical Web Test Automation with Selenium WebDriver” to teach software testing. However, this is rare.

A thank-you message from a University Associate Professor