My 8 Year Tech QA Software Testing Journey

I was tricked into becoming a software tester. No one I know grows up saying they want to be a software tester, especially 30 years ago. I recently did a career day at my old high school and started reflecting back on my career journey from the last 8 years. I started out as Software Developer and now I am Software Tester, so what happen?

College/University/Education

I got my education from a small school in NY called Farmingdale State College where I also played basketball(captain) and was a Resident Assistant in charge of the freshman dorms. At Farmingdale I obtained my bachelors degree in Computer Science because I wanted to be a developer. While at Farmingdale I got an internship, which sounds amazing, but it was an internship in networking and fixing hardware.

After graduation, I figured I would have jobs flooding my inbox with offers. However, as I mentioned, my internship in networking and fixing hardware, which is cool to know but wasn’t going to really help me get a job in software development. So I went back to my job at the airport in the meantime because I had to pay bills and started applying to jobs daily for a few MONTHS.

This process was very frustrating because I would feel I did well on an interview and then either never get a call back or get a simple “we decided to go with a different candidate” email. I was stuck in the problem of everyone wants someone with experience, but no one wants to give you that experience. After going on a few interviews in that span, I finally got an offer.

Job Hunting Process

After applying to hundreds of jobs I actually got 2 offers in the same week, I was on top of the world. Now I went from nothing, to having to make a decision. One would be a further commute, 50 mins, and paid less, but made some big promises about a bright future. The other was more straightforward, and only a 20 minute drive from where I lived, so it seemed like a no brainer.

In the interview for this closer company, they mentioned that they had failed to release this new company software twice already and this would be the last push for it. They also mentioned “this is not a temporary job” which should have been a red flag, but I was young so I…