Firstly side hustling, depending on what work you’re doing, is sometimes excluded by a contract. Consider what you’re contractually permitted to do, and also what would annoy your employer either way. Many employers would consider you to be de facto on retainer for services rendered.
- What are some potential side hustles that are compatible with the skill set of a QA/TA engineer?
- Freelance work
- Write a blog, with advertisements
- Publish a book
- Start a video channel
- Record courses for Udemy et al.
- Tutoring
- Write and sell tools, apps or APIs
- Bug bounties
- Join with others to test a new software project and share in the profits.
- I know there are specific online platforms that cater to professionals in the tech industry like Fiverr, Upwork and other freelance networks but I don’t fully understand who or why would require a service of a test automation engineer other than more-than-average sized enterprises (that, to begin with, will require more than 1 TA engineer for the scale of work involved)?
The second I worked for myself is the second I realised how tragic the machinations of capitalism truly are. When people say they provide a service it’s much less about capabilities and technical value, and much more of an emotional exchange. People will pay other people to do things because they find them scary, or doubt themselves, or think they don’t have the time - sometimes because they have failed to understand very simple things. I know a man who got paid to drive out to people’s houses and plug the coaxial cable back into their televisions. So it’s about extracting money from people for value they’re getting, even if that value is “I don’t understand something I could learn in 5 minutes, but I’ll pay you to listen to me complain about it while you do it for me”. The people who sell computers at PC World are not hardware experts with a passion for components; I think you see where I’m going.
Then advertising and marketing become much clearer concepts, and while it may be obvious why they take up so much budget it becomes terrifyingly clear when one realises that ones place in the world as a businessperson is more about sales, negotiation and manipulation than it is about skill and knowledge and technical capability. Doing testing is a one thing, selling testing is a completely different thing.
So, in short, people will pay you to do things because you have convinced them that they have a need for it. You sell the problem then the solution.
If you’re thinking of automation as a side-hustle you’re probably looking at contract work (I can’t imagine you’d be permitted to do that, or have the time to), or consultancy (perhaps a little easier, depending on the circumstances, but comes with responsibilities that may clash with your contract job), or teaching. A small company may need help to set up an environment for automation and begin a new automation project, or training on how to use their tools.
Or you can use a subset of those skills. You can write code, so you can develop apps, for example. Think about all the little things you do that you don’t notice - setting up environments, working with networks, driving to work, and think about how it might turn a profit.
Please be warned that all exchange of money for services involves interacting at some level with a “customer”, who are the worst people on the planet.
You could apply a creative endeavour with your domain knowledge. Sell T-shirts that say keep calm and on. The idea here is to make money faster than you hate yourself. Although if you’re actually creative, and from your writing you appear erudite, you could come up with something good, too. You can get others to sell your designs on products now, which saves you a lot of hassle and inventory and data protection and returns policy.
- How can I effectively balance my full-time job with a side hustle without compromising the quality of my work?
Every second you spend making money outside of your career is time, energy and attention you could be putting into making yourself a better tester, or a better automation designer. However if you can find money in things you already do outside of your work hours and responsibilities that feed into your own education, that would be self-improvement while getting paid.
You need to decide what you can get away with in your job, and how much spare resource resource you have for your hustle - and what the flexibility of that resource is (what if your job keeps you late for a week?).
- Can you share any success stories or tips from your own journey in finding a side hustle as a QA/TA engineer?
I never made money out of my extra work. So, basically, no I can’t. But I tested open source software, did mentoring, wrote articles and posts about testing, answered testing questions online, did lunchtime workshops with other testers at my company, had a fairly successful social media following and so on. I found those to help me, emotionally and intellectually. Making any of these profitable would have been possible, but not helped me in my goals - and I was well paid by a company who paid more for my propensity to self improve and teach others.
I think that, say, monetising my blog would have created a lot of problems for me. A responsibility to make content, the need to make clickbait and advertise everywhere, pressure to use antipatterns for profit, working on the SEO and a bunch of other admin I have no interest in, the usual stuff that comes with money, and the creative restrictions that imposes.
I made all my extra money from financial investments, prudent savings, budgeting and non-testing-related activities in basements.
Hope some of that was of import