I worked embedded in QA teams for several companies for over 25 years, both in gaming and practical systems, if anyone tells you that it's a simple job they are woefully mistaken.

Hell, I worked at EA in several different teams during the early 2000's and I can tell you that outside of a few specific development roles, QA was constantly doing nothing but scut work in tiny cubicles in a room that is about 800sqft for about 16-19 hours a day, 6 days a week.

QA, especially for game companies, is about as glamorous as someone's first day as a trash collector. Between having to be highly attentive and specific to testing criteria and having periods where you feel like everything you do is pointless, you live the duality of over-worked and under-utilized simultaneously. Experience has told me that broken release software is rarely the fault of the testing teams, despite the constant barrage of hate it receives.

It is by far the most dysfunctional department in any sector. It's also horribly underpaid, even for the entry-level positions.

When I started in QA at the end of the 90's as an entry level grunt I think I got paid like $22/hr and worked something like 75 hours a week for the first 8 months of employment, thinking that I'd be making bank by doing what I loved to do (breaking software), when in reality that the $22/hr was dependent on what my weekly task chart looked like... in reality I was getting closer to $13/hr because more often than not, my workflow consisted of sitting at my terminal waiting for a build that rarely came. Suffice to say that it was after leaving that job that I stated to take a more active part in my contractual discussions.

You rarely have any good stories out of QA unless you're embedded directly with a developer, and that is still a crapshoot sometimes.

This comment was edited on Jan 22, 2022, 20:52.