Good on them. From my experience, QA, especially game QA is looked down upon by leadership and developers - peers - alike. Collective bargaining can only help them.
I really try to be understanding, but my time in QA, working with QA as a dev, and then organizing testers on a team has not left me with many favorable memories.
> From my experience, QA, especially game QA is looked down upon by leadership and developers - peers - alike.
If you have a dedicated QA team that is staffed by people who don't write software, those people are at best technicians. They are not peers of the engineers, they're a different job function with a much much lower barrier to entry. They're closer to the customer support team than they are to engineering.
That's not to say that they are somehow undeserving of basic respect. They are (as are support personnel), but given the choice between QA and engineering, almost anyone would choose engineering. The reason QAs aren't on engineering teams is that they can't pass the interviews. The inverse is not true.
None of that is to bash QA. But pretending they're peers of engineering and lamenting that they aren't treated as equals is just based on a fantasy.
> But pretending they're peers of engineering and lamenting that they aren't treated as equals is just based on a fantasy.
You have just built an elaborate strawman. No one argued for equal rights/equal salary/equal treatment of QA people with their dev peers. They are just looking for better work conditions and better job security.
In my experience a QA is to an engineer what a nurse is to a doctor. They take measurements and can have a good eye for what might be going on, but they don’t know the code. A QA automation engineer is more like a nurse practitioner.
It doesn’t mean they aren’t smart but if they could write code they would, unless you’re working somewhere that compensates QAs and engineers the same (which I’ve never seen). Had a QA coworker try to learn to code and he just couldn’t quite get it.
Proper testing, especially manual, explorative testing is _incredibly_ difficult and it can also be mentally exhausting and tedious. IMO a good tester is worth their weight in gold. And I think as a developer one can benefit greatly from thinking and working more closely to and with testing and usability.
I'm possibly biased, because explorative testing is one of my weaker areas as a dev. I'm way better at debugging once I know that there is a problem, but finding a problem that I don't know about yet, I find quite hard to do to say the least. And I think it's awesome to observe people who are really good at this kind of thing.
That's an interesting choice of analogy. Just a few weeks ago there was a popular submission here reporting how 90% of nurses are considering leaving their profession in the next year due to burnout and poor working conditions [0]. It's true that doctors receive more training, but without nurses (hell, even with any fewer nurses than we have now) our health system would completely collapse.
It's a very rough analogy. Required skills for an entry level QA tester is pretty low. It's essentially "do these things in a video game, look for bugs". It's certainly not just having fun playing video games all day, it's far more rote, but it's hardly a scare skill.
Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).
Yeah. Companies make the engineers do the nursing work on top of the doctor work, with a dose of self service nursing for the customers, who need to report their own symptoms into a tracker as well as gather and report their own vitals during their treatment.
The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system.
Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.
It's an apt analogy, becauses nurses often know more about what's going on with patients and practical realities, but doctors are more capable of reasoning through complex root causes and designing future care plans.
The thing is: consumers don’t care about which job within the development cycle is the hardest or whatever else. They care that their software is relatively bug free. The industry as a whole has been cutting costs in QA and the games are buggy as all hell on release as a result with only a few exceptions. So maybe this QA unionization can save the industry from itself: from dumb dick measuring status games like the ones this comment thread is filled with and from the hubris required to charge 60-80 bucks for unplayable games.
That’s maybe the most romanticized notion I’ve ever read on this website. QA are more like janitors to dev doctors. They are required to know little to nothing in regard to coding, their jobs speciously require creativity, and they’re effortlessly replaceable.
Doctors cannot do their job without nurses. MS just tossed their entire QA staff with no apparent consequences.
Agreed. In the places I’ve worked with dedicated manual QA, I’ve tended to see net negative impact.
It can be like working with someone who has the technical understanding of a user, but with write access to Jira, and whose reason for employment is predicated on being a blocker with some frequency.
The best places I’ve worked have instead had engineering cultures of robust automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous delivery.
At least in emergency care, nurses independently resolve the vast majority of cases (though of course the doctor on duty has the final say/responsibility) and also have significant medical training. Nurses are also responsible for triaging (prioritizing) cases which is not infrequently a life and death level of responsibility. As part of their education nurses are also required to take classes which are generally considered weedout in the sciences, such as organic chemistry.
Most nurses could likely become doctors if they so chose, but 8 years of education, a few more years in residency/'bootcamp', and at many places having insane hours + being always on call, and everything else that comes with being a doctor is not everybody's cup of tea.
A nurse is much more comparable to something like a dev whereas a doctor is something closer to a combination of the tech and dev leads. QA doesn't really have an appropriate analog in medicine because every person plays a critical role. A hospital without nurses would become instantly inoperable. By contrast companies can, and have, scrapped their entire QA departments and continue to function more or less normally.
I think a key issue is that software that's overtly buggy reflects more on poor development and management practices than it does on poor QA practices.
When I worked in QA many years ago I was just as much a coder as I am now. As a self taught programmer from an unpromising background I tried to take the route that was most accessible to me. I wasn't the only programmer or artist in the QA team looking for a way up. Before I got that job I worked in a factory cleaning up animal figurines with a dentists drill after they came out of the moulds. I could code then too.
The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.
> But pretending they're peers of engineering and lamenting that they aren't treated as equals is just based on a fantasy.
Being QA is not that much different from engineering. During my childhood I quite enjoyed breaking games if I could. I hated being restricted, and I loved hacking[1] them. Speedrunning works much in the same way. This is what lead me into engineering. Of course one requires much more education, but I'd argue that the time, dedication, and thought process is about the same.
> The workers at Raven Software, which is a Wisconsin subsidiary of Activision, voted to form the union Game Workers Alliance with the Communications Workers of America. Nineteen workers voted in favor of the union, with three voting against, the National Labor Relations Board tallied Monday. Two additional challenged ballots were uncounted, but do not change the outcome.
A small group but maybe if it doesn’t cause the death of the world it will continue.
The small team makes a game called “Call of Duty” so it’s definitely up from an indie studio.
I'm sure you can find 19 people who want to be paid for playing video games. There are many places where QA isn't paid. It's an honor to help out the development of games and see things early.
You aren't paid to play videogames. You are paid to test videogames.
It's asinine to think they are just playing the games - QA has complex skills necessary to succeed, from technical writing to careful test planning to cross organizational planning. QA is some of the least rewarding and most difficult work in a games studio.
It's like asking why camera operators in film sets "get paid to watch movies". We've decided we like games, so we better pay people for the labor in making them.
Fuck off with this "it's an honor" bullshit. It's work. It deserves good working conditions.
>It's asinine to think they are just playing the game
There are bad parts of every job. The fun part of SWE is coding, but that doesn't mean I don't have to write design docs, coordinat between different teams, etc.
>It deserves good working conditions.
I agree, but that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
one should not have to rely on the hugely imbalanced power structure between employer and employee to get better working conditions.
these people have stopped licking the boots of capitalism and started to demand change. there’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s no inherent moral value that people should adhere to in their work relationship that precludes them from forming a union.
I sit upon a silk cushion, my servants fanning me as I pluck a grape from the bowl. “The plebs don’t understand how hard I work too”, I complain to no one in particular. “Don’t they realize a union will only hurt them? If they’d just brought me their concerns, I’m sure I would have changed those policies.” My guards chuckle as they spear a nearby peasant and toss him from the ramparts.
Is this seriously supposed to be anything but hyperbole? It's not a question of how hard a given job is, but how much demand there is for a given job. If someone wants this job and wants it so much that they're willing to do it for less, I'm not saying no. Not unless there's some special skill that these existing QA people have that the rest of the labor pool lacks.
If someone else is capable of doing my job for half the pay, then hats off to them, and they deserve it.
That's certainly one theory on how to price labor, but it's not the only one (and not even the only one in our capitalist economy.) Worker coops, for instance, have a totally different theory of labor value.
So no, it's not hyperbole to suggest the poster is undervaluing their peers.
Honestly the tone of the post and the satirical post matched each other so precisely I think it serves as a useful counterpoint to what was posted. The continuity in tone with a completely different context sheds a new light on how problematic the content of the original post was. This is essentially what satire is for.
Writing design docs isn't a bad part of the SWE job.
> that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
Usually folks don't unionize until their work consistently fails to deliver good working conditions, so, yeah, in this case you do need to unionize to get that.
What's more difficult than a job that's absolutely soul draining and long hours for next to no pay?
It's difficult to become a software engineer, but the job is relatively easy. It's not hard to become QA, or a fruit picker, or meat packer, but those jobs are fucking hard.
> What's more difficult than a job that's absolutely soul draining and long hours for next to no pay?
An equally soul draining job that requires you to service customers. And equally draining job that puts in physical danger. And equally draining job that takes out on long distance travel, like crewing a vessel.
I really doubt that a company is going to struggle to find people to load up a build of the game and try to clip through walls all day.
"All people being treated with respect" and claiming a secondary role is the most difficult are no where near the same thing, and the emotionally manipulative equivocation is lazy and puerile.
I was an engineer in a games studio for years. QA did not have an easier job than I did. None of my engineer peers would do QA work. Wonder why that was?
Maybe because the life of a QA person was difficult? Long hours, contact labor, no benefits, low pay, repetitive work, limited opportunities for creative output, getting fired easily, getting blamed for buggy releases, putting up with prima Donna devs, working late into the night, being treated like garbage from the rest of the studio, etc, etc.
Like, I had more training and a specific set of in demand skills, but my job paid me will and gave me benefits and creative output.
I'd also find construction work, janitorial work, slaughterhouse work, fruit picking work, etc all much more difficult than being an engineer.
Don't confuse "difficult training" with "difficult job". It was hard to climb our ivory tower, absolutely, but we've got it easy after that.
I think the disagreement here is around different uses of the word "difficult". Engineering is a job that demands more skill. It is difficult in that fewer people are capable of doing it.
QA, and to a much greater extend the other jobs you listed, are difficult because they are unpleasant to do. That is, because people are unwilling to do them. (QA still has skill demands that limit the people who are able to do it, just much less so. I dont mean to equate it with the other jobs you listed that are largely just physically demanding and otherwise limited by tolerance for misery).
Both are accurate uses of the word, but are very different. I agree with you that QA is more difficult.im the latter sense.
Hahahahaha. Having worked in the industry for years, developing games is way easier than QAing them. It just requires a lot more initial training and skill development.
I was an engineer, and I don't think I ever saw anyone work harder for less reward than QA.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Eh. I will admit that this comment struck a chord a little.
It is a little upsetting, but I can see OP's perspective given that some people actually pay for early alpha access ( I am still annoyed at myself for purchasing BG3 demo that will come.. who knows when ).
This weird disregard for someone else's time is oddly widespread.
It is not an honor. It is a job. If you want it to be done well, one should be compensated for it.
Despite the poor tone, he has a point. The most difficult part of manual game testing is the sheer boredom of extremely repetitive work. Given the game industry’s never ending allure, it’s much easier to replace every worker in it vs other industries. It’s probably the same reason why the pay for similar positions is historically lower than other industries.
QA is a valuable skill set that is regularly underpaid and overworked. A good QA team makes or breaks a project, and there are plenty of examples of this in modern gaming.
Fuck “honor”, whatever the hell that means, and pay people what they are worth.
The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
I disagree. I don't think a lack of a good QA team breaks a project. Modern gaming is actually a great example that it doesn't. A lot of (most?) video games released nowadays are riddled with bugs. And yet they still make a lot of money through sales, micro transactions, seasonal passes, dlc etc. Even when a game releases with no major bugs it doesn't attract new players who will spend money.
>The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
I don't see how this would work. Somebody has to pay all the salaries, legal expenses, expensive equipment and software etc. Expecting people that want to work on video games to pull that kind of money out of pocket to fund a project that may or may not make any money is unreasonable. Nobody that wants to invest their money is going to give it to people who won't give them a return.
Indy games are in a golden age right now. Small teams are building stellar titles and making tons of money in the process.
Most of the horror stories you are hearing from the gaming industry are coming from large multinational studios, many of which are struggling financially.
Just look at the most recent battlefield release or cyberpunk for examples of what happens when you don’t value QA.
Unions seem to result in people staying at the same job for longer, right? It'll be interesting to see what happens when the same QA team works together for a long time, instead of the company laying everyone off as soon as the wind blows the wrong direction.
"Have unionized" as in, have formed a group to represent themselves collectively? Or, as in all QA developers at Blizzard now have to be a dues-paying member of this new QA union?
What strikes out at me is that only 19 of the 350 people at the company are unionizing. It's as though someone like specifically release engineers are going on strike, and 80+% of other developers are not. What keeps the company from just reassigning building releases to the other 80% of the developers?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadIf you have a dedicated QA team that is staffed by people who don't write software, those people are at best technicians. They are not peers of the engineers, they're a different job function with a much much lower barrier to entry. They're closer to the customer support team than they are to engineering.
That's not to say that they are somehow undeserving of basic respect. They are (as are support personnel), but given the choice between QA and engineering, almost anyone would choose engineering. The reason QAs aren't on engineering teams is that they can't pass the interviews. The inverse is not true.
None of that is to bash QA. But pretending they're peers of engineering and lamenting that they aren't treated as equals is just based on a fantasy.
You have just built an elaborate strawman. No one argued for equal rights/equal salary/equal treatment of QA people with their dev peers. They are just looking for better work conditions and better job security.
It doesn’t mean they aren’t smart but if they could write code they would, unless you’re working somewhere that compensates QAs and engineers the same (which I’ve never seen). Had a QA coworker try to learn to code and he just couldn’t quite get it.
I'm possibly biased, because explorative testing is one of my weaker areas as a dev. I'm way better at debugging once I know that there is a problem, but finding a problem that I don't know about yet, I find quite hard to do to say the least. And I think it's awesome to observe people who are really good at this kind of thing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180646
Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).
The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system.
Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.
Everyone has their expertise and strengths.
Doctors cannot do their job without nurses. MS just tossed their entire QA staff with no apparent consequences.
It can be like working with someone who has the technical understanding of a user, but with write access to Jira, and whose reason for employment is predicated on being a blocker with some frequency.
The best places I’ve worked have instead had engineering cultures of robust automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous delivery.
Most nurses could likely become doctors if they so chose, but 8 years of education, a few more years in residency/'bootcamp', and at many places having insane hours + being always on call, and everything else that comes with being a doctor is not everybody's cup of tea.
A nurse is much more comparable to something like a dev whereas a doctor is something closer to a combination of the tech and dev leads. QA doesn't really have an appropriate analog in medicine because every person plays a critical role. A hospital without nurses would become instantly inoperable. By contrast companies can, and have, scrapped their entire QA departments and continue to function more or less normally.
I think a key issue is that software that's overtly buggy reflects more on poor development and management practices than it does on poor QA practices.
The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.
Luck and circumstance definitely play a part in the job you do, but it's plainly not true that your job says nothing about what you're capable of.
Being QA is not that much different from engineering. During my childhood I quite enjoyed breaking games if I could. I hated being restricted, and I loved hacking[1] them. Speedrunning works much in the same way. This is what lead me into engineering. Of course one requires much more education, but I'd argue that the time, dedication, and thought process is about the same.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
A small group but maybe if it doesn’t cause the death of the world it will continue.
The small team makes a game called “Call of Duty” so it’s definitely up from an indie studio.
It's asinine to think they are just playing the games - QA has complex skills necessary to succeed, from technical writing to careful test planning to cross organizational planning. QA is some of the least rewarding and most difficult work in a games studio.
It's like asking why camera operators in film sets "get paid to watch movies". We've decided we like games, so we better pay people for the labor in making them.
Fuck off with this "it's an honor" bullshit. It's work. It deserves good working conditions.
There are bad parts of every job. The fun part of SWE is coding, but that doesn't mean I don't have to write design docs, coordinat between different teams, etc.
>It deserves good working conditions.
I agree, but that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
these people have stopped licking the boots of capitalism and started to demand change. there’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s no inherent moral value that people should adhere to in their work relationship that precludes them from forming a union.
Personally I cannot wait for these “engineers” to be treated like normal technicians.
The odd sense of superiority that people like OP seem to have is nauseating.
If someone else is capable of doing my job for half the pay, then hats off to them, and they deserve it.
So no, it's not hyperbole to suggest the poster is undervaluing their peers.
> that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
Usually folks don't unionize until their work consistently fails to deliver good working conditions, so, yeah, in this case you do need to unionize to get that.
It's difficult to become a software engineer, but the job is relatively easy. It's not hard to become QA, or a fruit picker, or meat packer, but those jobs are fucking hard.
An equally soul draining job that requires you to service customers. And equally draining job that puts in physical danger. And equally draining job that takes out on long distance travel, like crewing a vessel.
I really doubt that a company is going to struggle to find people to load up a build of the game and try to clip through walls all day.
Maybe because the life of a QA person was difficult? Long hours, contact labor, no benefits, low pay, repetitive work, limited opportunities for creative output, getting fired easily, getting blamed for buggy releases, putting up with prima Donna devs, working late into the night, being treated like garbage from the rest of the studio, etc, etc.
Like, I had more training and a specific set of in demand skills, but my job paid me will and gave me benefits and creative output.
I'd also find construction work, janitorial work, slaughterhouse work, fruit picking work, etc all much more difficult than being an engineer.
Don't confuse "difficult training" with "difficult job". It was hard to climb our ivory tower, absolutely, but we've got it easy after that.
QA, and to a much greater extend the other jobs you listed, are difficult because they are unpleasant to do. That is, because people are unwilling to do them. (QA still has skill demands that limit the people who are able to do it, just much less so. I dont mean to equate it with the other jobs you listed that are largely just physically demanding and otherwise limited by tolerance for misery).
Both are accurate uses of the word, but are very different. I agree with you that QA is more difficult.im the latter sense.
This is a sincere question but do you apply that standard to your interactions with others?
Who hurt you?
I was an engineer, and I don't think I ever saw anyone work harder for less reward than QA.
Modern QA IS engineering.
I would pay money to see you voice this kind of opinion in your workplace where you cannot hide behind the veil of anonymity.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It is a little upsetting, but I can see OP's perspective given that some people actually pay for early alpha access ( I am still annoyed at myself for purchasing BG3 demo that will come.. who knows when ).
This weird disregard for someone else's time is oddly widespread.
It is not an honor. It is a job. If you want it to be done well, one should be compensated for it.
QA is a valuable skill set that is regularly underpaid and overworked. A good QA team makes or breaks a project, and there are plenty of examples of this in modern gaming.
Fuck “honor”, whatever the hell that means, and pay people what they are worth.
The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
>The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
I don't see how this would work. Somebody has to pay all the salaries, legal expenses, expensive equipment and software etc. Expecting people that want to work on video games to pull that kind of money out of pocket to fund a project that may or may not make any money is unreasonable. Nobody that wants to invest their money is going to give it to people who won't give them a return.
Most of the horror stories you are hearing from the gaming industry are coming from large multinational studios, many of which are struggling financially.
Just look at the most recent battlefield release or cyberpunk for examples of what happens when you don’t value QA.
Activision is likely to drag their heels on negotiating for years, unfortunately.
What strikes out at me is that only 19 of the 350 people at the company are unionizing. It's as though someone like specifically release engineers are going on strike, and 80+% of other developers are not. What keeps the company from just reassigning building releases to the other 80% of the developers?