this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Should abbandon starting in SWE in favor of Testing? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 months ago by abbadon420@sh.itjust.works to c/cs_career_questions@programming.dev
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I'm 35. I just finished my bachelor in january. I've been teaching python, java, springboot and devops in a small college for the past 4 years. I thought that would give me an edge on an allrr3ady strained junior market at the time. But the junior roles have all but dried up now. I've been looking for almost 6 months now and I've had several good talks. All are enthousiastic about me, but none are currently hiring juniors.

Now I've gotten an offer for a Test Engineer Training. Its similar pay to what I get now as teacher, which is not a lot, but it has better secondary conditions. I might be able to negotiate better pay because of my experience and that would make the offer a lot better.

I do still love progammming though. My dream was to start in a larfe enterprise organistion, work with springboot and grow into lead or rachitect. I woory that if I choose for testing, that I will not be able to grow into a fun and challe ging role. On the other side, I do think that testing and data have better prospects in the current AI turbulence.

How do yous feel about testing as a career? Willl that be the end of my non-existing SWE career? or are all tgese roles maybe more relevant and related in a more fundamental way than I can imagine?

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[โ€“] unmagical@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago

Testing isn't a strictly manual process. You may be writing auto tests, you may be writing tools, you may be branching out into general uptime maintenance. You may even be programming features. All that's gonna depend on what orgs you join and what you are prepared to bring to the table.

Also worth considering the impact on AI in the field. Some orgs are gonna nix QA entirely and rely on AI to generate tests. Others are gonna move more toward TDD with AI using the manually created tests as a guide for the development of features. Still others are just gonna want some assurance that the AI puked up slop that kinda works.

I'm currently a SWE, but I know several people (many who make more than me) who've successfully pivoted into SDET roles and love what they do.

[โ€“] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

As unmagical said, we're all slop code verifiers, now, at least some of the time. This isn't actually new due to AI, but the automated junior coder makers certainly make it worse.

QA staff who know automation are incredibly valuable, and often under-appreciated.

There's going to be un-meetable demand for software verification skills, as soon as anytime manages to measure (and start trying to recover) how much money the AI slop code wave is flushing down the drain.