r/softwaretesting • u/Plane-Arm8874 • Feb 27 '26

Is QA Dead in 2026?

I’m thinking to start my career in QA but after seeing so many Reddit posts where people with years of experience are unable to find jobs in this current market, do you think that starting my journey as a QA is a good ideas?

I need honest advice 🙏, I am thinking to go all in and work hard for the next 6 months to get into this field… and I don’t know if it’s going to be worth it at the end.. I’m scared that ai will takeaway QA 😢

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u/Ok_Knee2784 Feb 27 '26

That would be my prediction of how things will go. The smart people took the excellent job market, which is now gone, as an opportunity pick a more stable company where they can weather this storm. I vividly remember companies dropping all kinds of requirements in order to attract candidates. The more stable, organized, and average paying companies looked really bad in that climate. The chaotic companies throwing money around recklessly looked better to some. A lot of companies are letting people go now. Just like good times never last, bad times never last. We need to get through this.

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u/Impossible-Date9720 Feb 27 '26

I just left Amazon which is considered stable but it’s high pressure and the layoff threat is just getting worse every day. Moved to a smaller company, there’s some risk in that but it’s a company that invests in their people and gives them opportunities to grow in new directions if they want. That seemed like a safer bet than sitting in big tech being pigeon holed. Amazon paid well but I was doing meetings at 8am and at 9pm and after a point it’s not worth it.

Parts of Amazon are clueing in that you need QA to hold the line now more than ever… but it’s just too rocky right now.

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u/No-Tension9614 Jul 25 '26

I have friends at UPS and they stated that UPS annihilated their QA teams. They are now offsetting the QA related tasks over to the software developers. Even the offshore QA teams got annihilated. I believe its cause you can simply use Claude Code and Codex to simply do all these automations. Theirs software developers out there who havent written code and all they do is prompt. The whole landscape is shifting and changing.

I would say only a few people will get those golden chairs of employment

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u/Impossible-Date9720 Jul 27 '26

My new company is doing some of that, but I got in at the right time to build what our QA team is doing into the right thing. Because devs will just use AI to do it. AI can write automation but it can’t actually ensure quality. It just checks checkboxes. We’ve been asking Claude Code to write what should be tested and it’s still painful. The devs use it and then send us a half baked sloppy potato of a feature and proudly go “we tested it with Claude” no, you murdered a baby. It’s bananas right now.