Now that I'm working again, I have come to certain realizations.
The first of which is that I made some mistakes when looking for jobs this past spring. I was more interested in finding a job than in finding the right job. Granted, having a job with income is going to be better for me than the semi-employment of teaching computer programming classes. But it wasn't the path to long-term success. I really should have looked for a job that I wanted rather than taking the best offer that I received before leaving school.
This has led me to wonder whether I wouldn't have been better off just staying in Pittsburgh, where the cost of living was relatively low, and the expectations are likewise low for the people there. Doing a few classes a year probably would have gotten me by, and I could have had the same low-key semi-unhappy lifestyle that I had before, but at least I would have had a lot of free time.
So the mistake here was taking a QA job. QA people tend to have an inferiority complex, and I'm no exception. There is a lot of angst about QAers about whether they are good enough to be developers, and the general consensus seems to be that we're not. If we had been good enough to be developers, we would have been hired as developers instead of just QA. The attitude of most developers reflects this perceived inferiority, in that they rarely care what QA thinks, and definitely do little development with QA in mind. QA will always take longer than development, and yet it's given the shortest shrift in the development cycle. All of this leads to relatively unhappy and burnt-out QA people. Plus one.
The second realization is that this is a problem not limited to me. This is a general QA person complex. It also leads to a few general issues with QA departments. One is that it tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: QA people feel they must not be good enough for development, they become unproductive, and their work suffers (QA quality or development quality is irrelevant). Another is that QA people become less aggressive with the developers over time because the developers essentially "teach" them that the developers are not going to be that helpful to the QA people.
The third realization is that in general, of course it's going to be harder to get good QA people, too, because most of the people are who would be good QA people would rather be developers, and people who are confident about their abilities are not going to take the QA job unless they're really into QA. Which, I don't think, most QA people are (really into QA, I mean). And I don't mean to say that there aren't really good QA people who really like QA.
I don't really know what all this ends up meaning at the end of the day, other than I gotta figure out how to get out of here.
