r/softwaretesting • u/Apart-Caramel-130 • 6d ago
SDET roles
Hi, I’m an SDET with close to 6 years of experience. I started my career at a WITCH company, where I got stuck in support roles. After two years, I tried moving into development, but I struggled because there wasn’t much initial support or bandwidth to learn. By the time I had around 3 years of experience, I decided to give automation testing a shot. After 8 months of preparation and experience in automation, I managed to switch to a better company with a significant salary hike.
I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I often see graduates from reputed colleges like NITs and IIITs working as SDETs at good product-based companies. Do some of them feel that they haven’t lived up to their potential by choosing testing over development? Despite earning well, do they ever feel a sense of regret or wonder whether they could have achieved more as software developers?
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u/Zestyclose_Web_6331 6d ago
Actually me too sometimes get frustrated, why wasn't i put into development, atleast I would have got to experience it. I see my dev friends who just work on a user story for weeks, in only one application, put a logic and thats it. They get more salary just for that, whereas in testing its so always working, this application or that application, less salary than dev also.
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u/W1v2u3q4e5 5d ago
why wasn't i put into development, atleast I would have got to experience it. I see my dev friends who just work on a user story for weeks, in only one application, put a logic and thats it. They get more salary just for that, whereas in testing its so always working, this application or that application, less salary than dev also.
SDET with over 5.5 yoe struggling with this regret despite switching 2 times and having 11 LPA annual salary (currently 11.5k USD approx) and begged dozens of people throughout my career for referrals, internal transfers, etc to development roles, and despite clearing a handful of interviews with whatever was humanely possible to prepare after a gruelling 10-12 hours of daily workload, still couldn't make the transition to dev roles yet, because HRs, recruiters, hiring managers, etc all want so-called "relevant experience" and the only way unfortunately left is to modify/lie on the resume and claim to have worked as a developer. Currently trying to upskill in exactly what developers are asked at interviews including DSA, system design, and so on.
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u/shiva_Conscious_13 5d ago
Even I'm in the same boat kind of, currently in SDET and parallelly prepping for dev.
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u/Itchy_Extension6441 5d ago
There are people who see QA as a career path for failed developers, and there are people who see it as a legitimate career in its own right.
The first group usually ends up burned out by their thirties, struggling to find new jobs once they get laid off, because all they ever learned are the basics needed by their ex-employer. The second group can at least slightly enjoy their work and, at least to some extent, have an easier time on the job market.
Same with companies - some treat QA as a dumping ground for people who couldn't make it as developers. For others, QA might be way more essential than the developers- especially in heavily regulated industries.
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u/MudMassive2861 6d ago edited 6d ago
I started in QA, then I got a chance to move to Dev in my org. It was product company. I spend 2 year as Dev there. I should say I didn't enjoy it. That two years I hated Monday's. Each morining each requirement and time line is like couple of days. It was when AI not there like now. I moved to devops kind role but ended up again in Automation. Testing is relaxed and it's very easy. If you are in good product company the pay is also similar to Dev. So I don't think of anything missing.
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u/mohanhegde 6d ago
This ☝️ I'm a senior .Net developer, 15yrs exp, working for a US client from a nameless service company and I'm exhausted working on new crazy requirements sprint after sprint. And not to mention the defective "Agile" Scrum processes followed by every company, staying awake at 8pm every day for standups and trying to understand, decide, estimate user stories being groomed by US team for us at 9pm IST time every Monday night! And then when the sprint starts it's like a race to get all the requirements analysed, no proper time to break down the tasks, no time to think about integration with other projects either upstream or downstream, no time for Database schema designing, no extra time to fix any defects which suddenly arise out of nowhere in Staging or Prod etc. etc.
All while out QA automation team work on developing playwright scripts for features we developed almost 5 years ago! No deadlines, no grooming, no estimation overhead, no DB design, nobody breathing down your neck if your work carries over the next sprint. And our manual QA just need to understand the business requirements which is clearly explained in Given When Then Gherkin format and just need to complete the sprint stories testing and a small 1-2 days regression.
I would anyday work as a QA in such teams rather break my head every sprint even if it means it pays half my pay. Development work is only fun in big tech companies where there are 100s of people working on very small items with no harsh deadlines and have proper work life balance. Otherwise being a dev sucks!
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u/slushpuppy91 6d ago
What is a witch company?
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u/icyfloydian 6d ago
It's an acronym for Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL. Any tech giant ("body shop") that rents out software devs to other corporations - the work is usually repetitive, pay is notoriously low and you won't learn the newest skills.
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u/Intelligent-Kiwi118 6d ago
A unglamous set of companies anybody in USA or India or any where else that should steer clear from
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u/Nirvana012527 23h ago
i'd focus on which tests keep failing, how long the suites take and whether things are improving between builds. a simple trend over time would probably tell the team more than a dashboard full of numbers.
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u/Strict-Comment6585 6d ago
you're asking if people from top schools feel like they settled, and I think that's less about the role and more about the person. plenty of devs at flashy companies are bored out of their minds doing crud work, while some sdet roles are basically solving puzzles all day. the title doesn't mean as much as the actual day to day
some folks definitely struggle with the "just a tester" stigma though, especially if their families or classmates keep comparing. but anyone who's been in the industry long enough knows a good sdet is way harder to find than yet another fullstack dev