I actually started with a degree in finance but then I got sacked during the 2008 crunch and it was hard for me to find a job.
I then asked myself “where is the money?” and picked up a programming book. Was a C++ dev for a while but kept criticising problems with our product. We didn’t have any QA other than devs a little unit-testing and manual testing every now and then… I was asked by my manager to start the QA team and have been in QA/QM/SDET roles since then (let’s call it 10 years).
I joined here to stay on top of the new things and chat with like-minded people.
I like understanding the product, which does involve manual testing and also I manually test when I RnD the automation solutions.
But I learned very quickly I am a bad manual tester.
First few times is fine but after a while, I either get bored and distracted while I am supposed to be clicking around or I auto-pilot it and miss bugs.
Huge appreciation to people who can do it. Not me.
Oddly enough, I rarely automate Selenium stuff. My roles were always some products that offered a proprietary interface. Most of my career I was with a company that develops IDE’s - so that was using SWT bot to interface with the java application.
Then lots of TCP sockets for testing the services offered by a registry.
Then API-level automation. But funnily enough it’s rarely HTTP API but again some proprietary web protocol
But I am fine with Selenium. Actually Selenium is amazing and I use it for automating life chores in general
