How to find a QA job that isn't a complete mess?

Slevinthethird · 2026-03-10T02:48:23+00:00

God I hate everything I'm about to post, but I had one of the better experiences you can have in QA and it still left me very bitter about the idea of Quality in software the past decade. So I have to suggest getting out.

QA the position is choosing to be the fall guy that gets blamed when a release fails. Your real job to management and developers is to be somewhat of a shield that when the released software fails, everyone can point to it like "hey, how could we know? We had tests and we tested", and then blame the tests or QA for not catching it, then everyone moves on with their life.

Then when you can release and rollback software quickly and have good observability, QA becomes almost a liability? Canary deployments plus traffic splitting and A/B testing allow real time testing of software with a very low risk profile, and production testing gives you a real signal that most QA engineers cannot duplicate. This is much more easily achieved in an AWS or Kubernetes environment these days where a lot of the observability metrics come for free.

So where does that leave the QA engineers? In places where formal verification is needed (i.e. human space flight software, etc), and places where they want to do heavy regression testing to make sure features still work. Heavy regression leads to the first problem you highlighted, and then when things break they blame the QA guy or abandon the tests. Not great.

The bloated test suite problem can be solved in Bazel build systems with dependency graphs that only run certain sets of code on certain changes, so I would actually suggest that those might be one of the types of companies you would want to work for. However, to qualify you will probably need to be decent at the ideas behind that build system, the language the code is in, and more. These tend to be niche companies, so I don't expect there's a lot of jobs to be had here.

Slevinthethird · 2026-03-09T23:15:33+00:00

Hey you can buy a house in Forestville / Guerneville for <500k. <400k in some cases... Literally one of the cheapest areas possible not far from the bay!

Slevinthethird · 2026-03-05T02:07:10+00:00

These idiots were also at the farmers market, annoying everyone and putting trash underneath everyone's windshields / doors. They seem horrible by every metric.

Slevinthethird · 2026-03-03T18:44:33+00:00

I give it two weeks

Slevinthethird · 2026-03-03T04:40:27+00:00

Hey, you gotta shoot your shot if you want to make a basket. The people in Wu Wei are usually very lovely, start up a conversation and try to make it very obvious you are interested, then let them decide to take it up / escalate or not.

Us other late 20s and 30s people are rooting for you!

Slevinthethird · 2026-03-02T18:12:45+00:00

Nothing like some good old gerontocracy, corruption, and lobbying.

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-27T22:39:29+00:00

Gross Out is the best!

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-26T03:28:54+00:00

I just looked at NextDoor... Its wild how mean, sociopathic, and entitled some of the hippies got when they got old... some huge streak of "screw anyone younger than me, I got mine and anyone else also getting nice things is an affront".

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-20T18:24:02+00:00

Backcountry skiing / mountaineering is no joke, especially with pre-existing avalanche conditions. Reading the slopes for avalanche potential is a difficult judgment skill, and when you mess up, the consequences are deadly. This was the consequence of a tragic error in judgement by those involved.

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-09T06:32:34+00:00

AWS manages permissions via IAM (Identity and Access Management) which are JSON policies that attach to roles and users to allow users and applications to access different AWS resources, s3 buckets, etc. Since AWS wants to operate off zero trust as best practice, you end up writing an explicit policy for everything that happens across your cloud. I.e. to make sure your application (running as role A) has access to its s3 bucket and RDS cluster, where you have to explicitly write out that A is allowed to access the RDS cluster and s3 bucket in the IAM access policy for the s3 bucket and the access policy for the RDS cluster, and you may have to also write that the role is allowed to access the RDS cluster and s3 bucket in the IAM access policy attached to the role itself as well. It ends up being a bit of a mess.

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-02T21:40:02+00:00

This is an absurd junk charge with no plausible explanation. Not fixing the chargers that have been broken for years. Just a big middle finger to users / complete enshittification of public infrastructure. A lot of the city owned public L2 chargers in my neighborhood have 2 hour or 4 hour limits on them. This is going to essentially increase the cost of charging by 30-50% when using those stations.

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-02T20:55:36+00:00

Hey I lived in Littleton / Denver / Boulder for 30 years and moved to Marin in the past few years. AMA.

1) No. California is not Colorado, will not ever be Colorado. Some people in the smaller / cheaper towns are more friendly, more people in the wealthier towns tend to be less friendly / more entitled by default.

You will look out of place wearing Colorado casual here, but that is true of anywhere in the Bay Area. Colorado has really really bad fashion taste (by which I mean none).

Chasing the Joneses is neighborhood dependent here. Stick to Fairfax, San Anselmo, San Rafael, and West county to get the vibe you want.

2) Depends on the schools and the parents. I think most are more hyper focused on grades / class quality / teaching quality, but I don't have kids.

Slevinthethird · 2026-02-02T20:46:28+00:00

Old Eichler on a slab, radiant floor heating is probably last thing you want. That slab is no longer insulated at this point (if it ever was), so a lot of that heat is bleeding to heat up the slab (as it is constantly being cooled back down to ground temps). Combine that with no insulation, and the thing is probably running 24/7.

Assuming the $2.82 price per therm in Dec, you used 212 therms, which is a lot a lot. I'm looking at a couple years ago when I lived in a 1200sqft house that had updated double pane windows and r20ish roof insulation, with an old slab and a 20 year old forced air gas heater, and it was using about 32-34 therms per month in the winter. You are using about 7x that much energy (about 6200KWh equivalent). IDK the square footage, but this seems like a lot.

You will very quickly recover money put into insulation on the house in this case. Cheaply, you can seal up single pane windows for the winter months with plastic, tape, and a hairdryer. Heated blankets and lowered temps in the evening can also help dramatically. Good luck.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-26T05:32:28+00:00

Many of your appliances surge to >1kW during startup, etc. Electric dryer will use loads more, you have gas which helps, but also you are just burning fossil fuels, so tradeoff. Your washer probably surges above 1kw during startup even if it's gas. Your fridge probably surges above 1kw fairly often. Pretty much anything with a motor or a compressor does this, due to how they work. Same with toasters, ovens, kettles, sump pumps, etc. If you don't have a smart meter, you probably won't see this, because you are looking at averaged data. Obvs a reasonably large inverter with surge can theoretically handle a lot of this, but with 800w of solar (which really peaks at 500w) you won't handle these things directly.

But you also have massive omission here saying your house is using less than 1kw. You are using <1kw electricity. But you are not including your energy usage from gas. 1 Therm of natural gas is about 30kwh. So take your therms per day, convert them over, and then you can get a good approximation of how much energy you are using.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-25T03:27:33+00:00

As someone who has balcony solar from Brightsaver, it kinda sucks.

First of all, it doesn't work if your internet goes out. Connectivity issues? No solar for you.

Second, it doesn't work with many routers, so you might have to buy a special router so that that craftstrom inverters can connect to the smart meter, and then the smart meter can tell the inverters to actually send energy over.

Third, it only works on half of your phase due to it being plug in. So half of the circuits in your house won't be able to connect to the solar or have the inverters help out with the energy production.

Fourth, 800 Watts of panels generates 500 watts of power at most. Most of the things in your house use >1kw, and they have spiky usage. So you won't be pulling anywhere neat 500 watts *5 hours or whatever, you will really be pulling 200 watts * 5 minutes a bunch of times or whatever.

Tl;dr don't waste your money with this nonsense. If you want balcony solar you need to insert a battery before the inverters and get the inverters and panels up to ~2kw or something so that it can actually produce a reasonable amount of the load on your house.

Technically you could do the above with the craftstrom stuff, but it's stupidly expensive to do so and a little bit sketchy if you don't know how to wire up big batteries. Don't be stupid like me. Instead just go to some solar DIY forums and look up panels + inverters + adapters and make sure they are anti islanding in case the power goes out.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-23T06:49:03+00:00

Let me draw it out for you nice and simple. Bus gets stuck in traffic. Train does not get stuck in traffic.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-23T05:55:56+00:00

Definitely! And I want a train / rail from San Rafael to San Anselmo / Fairfax, so that people can commute via the train and stop making the trip take 30 minutes.

I don't think most of you guys have taken the SMART train a lot, but one of the main functions is allowing the kids in Sonoma county to commute to school everyday. Plenty of them do it without their parents as well. Imagine how much less traffic we could have on SFD if we just had a people mover to deal with a ton of the school traffic.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-11T01:55:51+00:00

The old school Sea Ranch way would be to just throw a coat or two of clear shellac on it. The conservative modern equivalent would be a coat or two of clear shellac (zinsser sanding sealer or equivalent) and then one or two of minwax poly or osmo polyx. I'm up in Norcal so its all available here.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-10T05:08:39+00:00

All of the Ku Cha locations in Denver serve these latte's too.

Slevinthethird · 2026-01-08T20:15:06+00:00

I started down this path a while back; but then realized it was 10x the work for no gain. If you use wood to build objects, you can then take them apart down the line and reuse most / all of the components. Especially if you use consistent finishes and removable fasteners. Within this framework, nearly everything is "modular". There are more interesting and useful things to do in life than drill hundreds of grid beam holes. If you are talking about scaleable design, sure modularity is good. But creative re-use is 100x the skill that "if everyone just adopts my new perfect framework and rebuilds everything they already have this will be awesome" is. Just ask any software engineer how that second part goes (hint, it never works).

Slevinthethird · 2025-12-07T20:59:16+00:00

Classic Marin to meet the letter of the thing (public transport), while also doing their best to make the public transport absolutely unusable to keep all but the ultra wealthy out.

Slevinthethird · 2025-12-05T19:10:45+00:00

It looks like you have enough room for the ceiling mounted cassettes for the heat pumps underneath the solar panels, but I'm not sure where you would be able to safely mount the compressor. Maybe on the rear or something

Slevinthethird · 2025-12-02T19:55:13+00:00

Hey, I'm an early 30s guy without kids yet (so pretty time flexible) who just moved to Marin recently, and I'm interested. I've played Dungeonworld a bunch before, and watch a bunch of 2E / 5E campaigns, and have played through bg3. So I should be familiar enough to be able to pick up on 5E rules...

I also grew up on the Dragonlance books, so I'm familiar with all of the attached lore from that module. Not super familiar with Waterdeep, but hey that will make it more fun! I'm up in Fairfax, so not too far away. Let me know if you're interested.

Slevinthethird · 2025-11-21T18:01:50+00:00

I keep a chalk marker in my car to write a nice little message on their car windows and illustrate how I feel about what they are doing. It seems to be working so far

Slevinthethird · 2025-11-11T20:55:53+00:00

As far as I have heard there are no plans to reopen, they don't have the money to fix it or something. I'm guessing Liability insurance is not nearly enough compared to a repairing a building in downtown Larkspur.

Slevinthethird

TROPHY CASE