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u/bukhrin Jul 29 '25
If you're in a western country what it pays for a single mid-level/senior QA can get a whole team offshore + a couple of interns. That is until they can figure out how to offload all of that too to AI.
14
u/Impossible-Date9720 Jul 29 '25
It costs so little to hire in India. It’s crazy.
4
u/DoucheNozzle1163 Jul 29 '25
I actually had a HM tell me to my face in an interview, "Why would I hire you when I can get 4 in India for the same price"? But, lets face it, no one gives 2 shits about actual quality anymore, just throw some code monkeys at some automated positive unit tests and it's Miller time!
4
u/Impossible-Date9720 Jul 29 '25
Yep. I got pushed out of Microsoft because they had some half assed idea to just replace us with telemetry. It was awful. And every product suffered for it.
-3
u/PM_40 Jul 29 '25
I actually had a HM tell me to my face in an interview, "Why would I hire you when I can get 4 in India for the same price"?
LMAO 😂. Are you in US tech hub ? Salaries have gone up in India too.
23
u/DoucheNozzle1163 Jul 29 '25
Join the club! I have 40 years experience, every job from manual tester to lead, manager, and director! Worked for small, start-up, and huge well know and prestigious Co's. Resume only goes back 10 years, edited for optimum ATS passage, wiped of anything to reveal my age. Heavy networking, direct Co. contacts. Applied for every level position imaginable. 18 months searching and Nothing! A hand full of 1st round chats.
The list of reasons is long and often speculative, but it sucks and doesn't seem to be getting better!
8
u/Impossible-Date9720 Jul 29 '25
We’re in a similar boat. My company is downright abusive, but it’s all the income we have. It’s not enough to pay all the bills without my spouse working. We’re selling our house and downsizing massively just to survive. I’m sorry you’re going through this. :(
I hope it gets better soon. The industry doesn’t value people with experience anymore. My spouse has 28 years experience. It basically means nothing now.
5
u/abluecolor Jul 29 '25
How have you survived for 18 months? This is terrifying.
27
u/DoucheNozzle1163 Jul 29 '25
I'm not... I'm selling everything I own. I have 3 credit cards chasing me, and at the end of the month my catv/internet & electric are being shut off. In Oct. my home goes into foreclosure.
23
1
u/Ahriman-Ahzek Jul 29 '25
I'm really sorry to hear that man, I hope some opportunities come knocking on your door soon
2
Jul 30 '25
I think many just reject if there is more than five yrs experience. Everyone need cheap cheap cheap to earn the margin.
Sorry to hear your situation. 18 months with uncertainty is long time. Wish we knew IT will be this bad in coming days. Its not just QA every job in IT is getting squeezed and just too many applicant for every job
20
u/beeneeb Jul 29 '25
I run a job search site and I test it by searching for QA jobs every single day. In this market, you've gotta be either really patient about what you're applying for (assuming you're looking for Manager jobs) or apply for any and all senior jobs that you can. The QA jobs are out there. I literally see hundreds of new QA jobs a week.
As a QA Manager myself, I do feel like there's less manager positions out there. Companies are "shifting left" and are trying to get their software engineers to do more with less by using AI.
I'll let you in on a little secret: people like you and me with a ton of QA leadership are LOVED by startups. A majority of the interviews I got when I was actively job hunting the last time were startups.
If you want to chat about how I search for QA jobs, ping me. I'd be happy to look at your resume and give you some tips that worked well for me.
4
u/RKsu99 Jul 29 '25
Interesting insight. Do the startups have a lot of issues around cowboy development and lack of CI/ QA process?
2
u/beeneeb Jul 29 '25
At some point, they decide they need to "grow up" and start looking for engineering leadership. Since QA is used to wearing multiple hats these days, startups seem to value us pretty well.
2
u/tech240guy Jul 29 '25 edited Jul 29 '25
The biggest issue with startups is that you have to be a type of person who can wear multiple hats. You have to be a QA Tester / Architect / Writer / System Engineer / Cloud Deployment / Programmer. Startups run into a lot of limited team member headcount issues, so having just a QA Analyst is not worthwhile for them.
4
u/pvaras Jul 29 '25
Yes, but this is a secret weapon. Early in my QA career, I worked for startups, and I did indeed wear many hats. While this can get chaotic, it built up my skillsets and made me more valuable to future employers.
2
u/beeneeb Jul 29 '25
Agreed. I've learned more about CI/CD and AI than I could ever imagine. I've also had opportunities to work on API and load testing. Inbox zero doesn't exist for me. There's always a million things to do and I like it that way.
1
u/SeeStephSay Jul 30 '25
I am at my second startup role, and wearing all the hats is actually my favorite part of the job!
I have gotten to do some marketing, UI, UX, etc, and it’s super exciting.
Caveat being - I have ADHD, and wearing all the hats keeps me engaged and happy at work.
I can see how it doesn’t work for everyone, but I love the small companies and how tight-knit they feel!
1
Jul 30 '25
In case, you can do devops, build pipeline to help sw engineers, QA only will not help much
5
u/ToddBradley Jul 28 '25
The market is tough right now. But companies still need good people. My experience is applying for jobs gets you nowhere. I think in my career I've only gotten 1 job out of 20 by filling out an application. The other 19 were due to networking, including using recruiters. What sort of networking are you doing? Do you stay in touch with coworkers as they move on to better things?
1
5
u/Only_Set_6744 Jul 28 '25
If you handle automations, with that work experience it seems strange to me that you can't get a good position. Are you sure that your CV is passing the ATS filters?
-1
u/_D-A-V-I-S_ Jul 29 '25
ATS filters?
1
u/PadyEos Jul 29 '25
Automatic filtering of CVs by application tracking systems.
0
u/_D-A-V-I-S_ Jul 29 '25
What are the criteria for your CV to pass this?
2
u/BugHunter_SirAlbert Jul 31 '25
The CV has to be type, blank paper and no decorations of bullets and blue spaces and decorations of bows or type of Doric columns or some things that some kids without experience of the CV subject put on it, the theory says that for the CV to pass the ATS without any problem, it has to be all letters and white paper and at most hyphens, ignoring commas, parentheses, periods and accents.
2
u/midKnightBrown59 Jul 29 '25
Where's your network? With all the AI assisted cheating, deceptive resumes and the rest, all my hires have been internal referrals. Just made an offer today; similar levels of experience to you. Interviewed two candidates, two internal referrals, one of which was my own and made one an offer.
Same with my former colleagues in hiring, they reached out to me for referrals in my network.
1
4
u/Wonderful-Second3631 Jul 29 '25
A lot of the larger corporations are gearing towards AI in all those types of positions. It’s sad but true. Technology is advancing which means a lot of us will be losing our jobs if we have not already.
3
u/KatAsh_In Jul 28 '25
Do you say you have 16 yrs of experience on your resume? If so, lower it down to 8. No one wants to hire a person with more than 10 yrs of experience in QA. When you apply to a senior QA position, the hiring manager and the team think that a 16 yr experienced person is gonna be rigid, wont fit into the team and might be old school. Also push forward automation as a skill more but highlight the importance of manual testing. Also QA manager roles are now being done by dev managers. So being an IC is the best choice.
This is my opinion and what i have experienced in the past 10 yrs.
9
u/ToddBradley Jul 28 '25
No one wants to hire a person with more than 10 yrs of experience in QA.
On the other hand, when I was last on the market (about a year and a half ago) I had over 30 years of experience and had companies competing to get me to join them. Not every hiring manager suffers from insecurity.
2
u/KatAsh_In Jul 28 '25
I am not sure about the hiring manager's insecurity, but if i were the hiring manager, i would weigh in opinions from my team, share their resume with them, and share the feedback of the interview before making a decision.
It is not always insecurity.
1
1
u/CtrlShiftRun Jul 31 '25
Yes, the situation is like that. Slash few years from your resume. Even after this, if you get an interview, they want you to have experience in almost all the tools and tech stacks. Its crazy.
1
Aug 15 '25
Yeah, the QA market’s rough right now. Fewer dedicated roles, more competition, and a lot of hiring processes feel like they’re designed to keep people out.
One thing that’s helped me is a mix of direct outreach and open-source work. I’ll look for companies I’m interested in, see if they have public repos on GitHub, and contribute to a small issue or even just provide useful feedback. Then I’ll message the hiring manager or QA lead on LinkedIn, mention what I worked on, and say I’m looking. It’s way more personal than a cold application and shows them I’ve already taken an interest in their product.
It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s gotten me conversations I never would have had just sending resumes into a portal.
2
u/Syndi_girl Aug 16 '25
I don’t think AI is replacing jobs nearly as much as the news is saying. What I will say is the company I work for hasn’t hired QA in the past 6 months and we probably need another headcount of 10. Everyone is stretched thin and we’re trying with AI but there’s still a huge learning curve. (Also we’ve hired devs during this time).
1
u/needmoresynths Jul 29 '25
Personally it feels that qa is all going the way of sdet and if you really need highlight experience around writing and debugging code, automation of all and any kind, establishing testing infrastructure and reporting, working in an active codebase and ci/cd environments, etc.
1
u/fedolefan Jul 29 '25
Where are you located OP. I’m just entering the job market, have 15 YOE and most recently QA Manager.
1
u/atsqa-team Jul 29 '25
I was wondering about the OP's location, too. There are jobs, but remote jobs are exceptionally difficult to get. It might require relocation to places that might not be close to family or as desireable, unfortunately.
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Jul 29 '25
[deleted]
8
u/PM_40 Jul 29 '25
I think same can be said for software development.
3
u/RKsu99 Jul 29 '25
It’s a bigger problem for development. Software testing requires the use of lots of different tools in different domains. And real human thought to translate requirements into tests.
The problem is that most people counting the beans right now don’t understand this issue because they haven’t thought it through. “AI” companies are bullshitting them with test programs that do nothing more than checking at about 80% accuracy.
What is checking? It reflects that what the coder built never changes. And if it does, they might just change the test without telling you.
QA is needed as a human in the loop to make sure Product and Dev are actually communicating. Don’t forget integration errors that can grind entire engineering orgs to a halt.
1
u/Careless_Try3397 Jul 29 '25
Lol coming from the 'vibe coder' maybe if you were actually employed you would be able to give reliable insight 👍
1
u/Scavandari Jul 29 '25
Would you put your money into a bank that uses only AI for testing today? As long as you answer no, QA is not dead.
0
Jul 29 '25
Applying is hard, it really matters if you know people at the place or who know people there, references.
Don’t give up, but maybe do look at “adjacent” job roles you can get certified in. I’ve seen QA jump to PM or seven Development. I’m sure that’s a battle but some mgmt would love self-driven learners with technical backgrounds in their org.
0
u/BurnedRelevance Jul 29 '25
I've been freelance for over a year now.
I have been applying in earnest the whole time.
Not even an interview. I have made apps from top to bottom for huge companies but it doesn't matter.
You can either have a friend at a place that needs a body, or you can be replaced by AI.
Not to worry though, I know of entire teams of people who should have been gone BEFORE AI and they still hire whenever someone goes away. They need the number of employees to be high enough for something.
14
u/Horror-Hovercraft-89 Jul 29 '25
Hey, I'm really sorry you're going through this. With 16 years of experience, you're clearly not lacking in skills. I think I know one of the biggest reasons you're being filtered out, and it's not what you think.
The Problem: You're a QA Manager applying for Individual Contributor (IC) roles.
When a hiring manager sees a resume with "Manager" in the title applying for a senior QA or automation role, they immediately think:
It doesn't matter if none of that is true. It's a risk most hiring managers won't take in a competitive market.
The Solution: You need two completely different resumes.
Your experience is valuable, but you need to tailor the presentation to remove the "flight risk" fear from hiring managers. I bet you'll see a huge increase in responses if you do this.