Where QA job ads go wrong

I’ve been shaking my head at QA job ads lately. They’re full of unrealistic demands and underwhelming salaries, clearly missing the point of what a QA role is about.

Many offers for QA Team Leads and senior-level experienced QA professionals are more suited for an entry-level Test Analyst. You won’t attract professionals with such rates; you’ll get someone barely making do.

Companies cry for long-term loyalty but don’t see the irony in their offers. When the market improves, these talents will leave companies with constant hiring cycles.

Do they need an Automation QA/Tester, Test Analyst, QA Manager, QA Team Lead, QA Engineer, SDET, Programmer and DevOps Engineer? Do they want all of them in one role? They don’t exist. Okay, I’m wrong, they exist but just a few of them. They already work for a great company and certainly, they won’t work for the offered salary for companies who don’t value people, their experience and their skills.


Here’s a thought:
Write realistic job descriptions.
Understand that hiring is about finding the right mix of talents, not a single miracle worker.
Value your employees’ diverse skills and experiences.
It’s not just about hiring; it’s about keeping your team happy, productive, and engaged.


What’s your take? Have you come across similar job ads in your field? How should companies approach hiring to avoid these pitfalls?

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Good point @shad0wpuppet - but hey, with AI we testers just press buttons and things get fixed like magic. :smiley:

Actually this could be also put into the thoughts of Software Testing Bullshit Bingo phrases from @christian.baumann :wink:
:point_down: :point_down: :point_down:

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IMO, its a symptom of an industry where Quality Analysis is very poorly understood. People who are only hand-wavingly knowledgable about QA left to define the roles. This is a symptom of organizations in which there has been a process that either had no QA resources at all, and they are seeking to graft QA onto a process that is already suffering. Or there was a process in which things are “thrown over the fence” to QA to go do “that test-y stuff you do”. My unpopular opinion is that much of this paradigm is of our own doing as we tend to do little to inform, advocate or even to dispel notions.

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I think they correctly reflect the knowledge of recruiters, IT leads managers, and testers about the profession of testing.
When I apply, I don’t have an idea about what they need, when I interview I find out they want 5-7 roles in one, when they offer a salary it’s of a junior tester.
And yet these positions get occupied by people who claim to know and can do a lot of the required things and are fine to work for a small salary.

They wouldn’t be able to make a difference anyway. And even if they would get a professional, do you think they see their value? We’re bad at expressing our mental work and we have no tangible outcome to make a difference in the business.

I forgot to add one point, why do you think companies need a professional tester and can’t do with an amateur that knows a bit of everything? Managers of testing are mostly testing amateurs also. Companies usually can’t afford to fix many issues and they’re fine with failure as long as the revenue flow is steady and increasing.

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I, don’t really buy the argument by @ipstefan that companies only care about money coming in undisrupted. I do agree that most teams have not got time to fix all of the bugs, and THAT cuts to the core issue that @msh highlighted. Testers don’t spend enough time being clear about what value we add and enough effort communicating what each defect we uncover means to the business. Sure, quite often the business has no clue what the defect will mean to revenues, but even that line is a bit tired, especially when it comes to security defects.

But as to the topic, in their defence job adverts are often very vague, I’ve even gone into an interview and really not read the advert from top to bottom in detail, because the true story only comes out when you get a human across the table from you. Quite often job ads are not allowed to include too much detail and the HR person will remove detail when they paste their boilerplate diversity/policy/environmental/community/equality blurb over the entire thing. It does still hurt that some terms like QE and QA ; and SDET and Automation-tester are not really equal in meaning on the face of it either.

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On top of it, titles like “Quality Analyst”, “Quality Engineer” etc are redefined on a per organization basis. Im a QA Manager now in title. But I manage no people. I manage process. I also had a lengthy interview process of a “QA Lead” role in which the “Lead” meant leading the test portion of a project by producing test artifacts for testers who would not be organizationally managed or led by me.

Additionally part of what I mean by “not advocating well” is that we, as a discipline, have so deeply focused on being “bug snitches” that we have failed to advocate for our Return on Investment in a way that demonstrates that value to executive levels. Its easy to draw a line to the black numbers on a Profit & Loss statement when Development Engineers are involved. Its not obvious with QA. We are seen as a cost only and weve done little to dispel that notion. Thus engineering management tends to be promoted from the ranks of developers who often have had no “time in seat” doing QA practices and have little idea how to manage a QA Engineer’s career. So… we have an Exec organization that desires to reduce cost (QA) and an engineering organization that has little, or a narrow, view of QA as a discipline. And those are all communicating and defining what a QA hire looks like to an HR or Recruiting resource who has even less of an understanding.

The result is a dog’s breakfast in QA Job advertisements.

As you mentioned, the true nature of the job and its duties dont come out until there is an interview. how many times have we heard “Oh! and another thing, you will also have to…”

This is not a complaint. Well not much of a one. Its my observation after going through the hiring process many, many, times over

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Another part of this conversation needs to be the wide discrepancy in tester skillset. A tester, senior tester or test lead can vary wildly between people with different skills expected from them.

That makes it hard to standardise pay by role, it can only really be looked at based on the expectations of the company. One person’s junior will be another’s lead tester after all (based on expectations from previous testers they’ve worked with).

I also find that different types of industry will have varying pay scales too. A more engineering company / startup will usually pay more for a role than an enterprise company (because they’ll ask for more from a tester at any level).

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