Well I started testing video games by looking for glitches when I was ‘young’ so when I got to software testing when I was looking for a job, I kind of had the same perception. Finding bugs in the UI and on the backend.
But it was so much more then that. I still have a difficult time trying to explain it all towards non-technical people what a tester does.
It used to be ‘find bugs’ but now that finding bugs has changed towards ‘finding performance issues, security flaws, business logic flaws, trying to nuke down servers & services’
I’ve been doing testing for over 10 years professionally now and I’m still excited and surprised by new things that I discover.
I’m a huge fan of edge cases and going out of the box to break applications.
It went from “humping walls to fall off the map” to “doing crazy workflows with hundreds of requests with crazy payloads” to get the weirdest result.