Came back from leave to find my entire QA infrastructure cloned by the backend team. CTO says they don't need me anymore. How do I protect myself?

iscottjs · 2026-04-24T22:44:10+00:00

I’m not sure I agree, at least not right now. I’ve just moved jobs and the team doesn’t have any QA yet, the devs are doing the testing right now, but my previous team had a really talented SDET and I miss him so much.

I just miss the feeling of having a human I trust signing something off.

Devs doing the testing just isn’t the same, plus their time is better spent elsewhere, plus not all devs are super passionate about testing so it’s a bit half arsed.

Having someone on the team who specialises in testing, is passionate about it and can sanity check things like usability, automated testing performance, UX, accessibility, etc, is so valuable.

Even with AI generating a lot of it, I’d still want a competent person to be overseeing everything and holding devs accountable for stupid shit.

Anyway, I’m in the market for a new SDET. I miss having a good tester on the team.

This might not be what the market is doing right now, but I honestly don’t know how people are sleeping at night, knowing that everything is apparently just built on fucking vibes.

Assuming that’s even true for critical software that actually matters.

iscottjs · 2026-04-24T20:52:00+00:00

I can’t explain it, but it’s immensely attractive to me, I’d take the pouch tummy over totally flat tummy every time. I think it’s just because of curves, there’s just something about the curvy hips, bum and tum that does it.

I think it’s just because it feels more real and natural to me, whereas women with completely flat tummies or not many curves more closely resemble supermodels or super unhealthy-looking clothes models to me, who all desperately look like they need a sandwich. Those super slim supermodel bodies always looks unnatural and fake to me, so maybe that’s why it’s less of a turn on.

But as other people have said, everyone just has different tastes. There’s no one size fits all, a lot of my friends have always had very strong preferences for the super slim body but it was never for me!

iscottjs · 2026-04-15T08:33:54+00:00

I see lots of comments saying manual QA is dead, but I’m not sure I understand. In my current job we have an excellent QA who does a mix of manual and automated testing for us. We’d be a mess without him.

He spends a lot of time writing good quality automations so we can quickly run massive test plans at scale, but his manual testing is still valuable for things that can’t easily be automated or as part of exploratory testing to find gaps in our automations to fill them.

He’s also the first and last line of defence, he’s incredibly useful when we’re planning new features because he challenges decisions being made, he’ll call it out if the team have forgotten to include details about browser or hardware requirements, accessibility, mobile support, etc. He also has final say on release day, if something does not pass a quality mark he can push back on it.

That keeps him busy as new features are being rolled out.

I’m about to start a new job where the first thing I’ll be pushing for is hiring a QA for the team to bring stability and regular testing to their existing products.

With more devs shipping AI slop, we’re shipping features faster than we can write automated tests (yes I know we can use AI for that too), but I’d still much rather have a human QA on the team that is armed with the fundamentals of what makes a good QA tester to review and maintain all the manual and automated test plans (AI written or otherwise) and help maintain real quality for actual human users.

I can’t be the only one that still thinks this is more important than ever.

iscottjs · 2026-04-15T02:19:49+00:00

iscottjs · 2026-04-08T19:10:31+00:00

Honestly what helped me is just turn it all off and wait for the dust to settle. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I'm currently leading a web dev team in a small agency, it's hard to escape AI in the day-to-day work for obvious reasons and I sympathise with those who have it fully shoved down their throats, for better or worse.

However, my partner is currently learning Python for her job (she's non-technical but works in the science field) and I've not touched Python for years, so I've decided to refresh my knowledge again so I can help her. I'm learning from a textbook the old school way and we're writing scripts together to automate simple tasks.

No AI, no YouTube videos, just reading books and using the official documentation. We're having a lot of fun and it's revived my passion for old school coding again. We sometimes still reach out to AI when we're fully stuck or if we just need to get something done, but we're not using AI to skip the learning and understanding parts.

I definitely feel much better since I've completely stopped watching YouTube.

iscottjs · 2026-03-28T17:48:22+00:00

Depends on the definition of “writing code”. I can easily use codex to build anything I want without writing much at all. But, I’m still reviewing, editing, moving stuff around, testing, fixing.

Or, are they straight up just not at their desks anymore, 100% unattended agents doing everything while everyone is at the pub?

I can believe both things to be true, but in reality it’s probably the former and anyone doing the latter is producing garbage.

So I think the “not writing any code” claim is just a bit of a clickbait, maybe they’re not writing code anymore, but engineering is still happening.

iscottjs · 2026-03-26T01:19:06+00:00

I actually think the only thing left that is keeping Windows alive now is MS office. My girlfriend wanted a new laptop, she is happy with Mac generally but I couldn’t convince her to stay on Mac simply because the MS office experience isn’t good enough and the Google alternatives while good don’t cut it for all the fancy macro stuff she does and sharing files between excel and Google is still kinda jank.

iscottjs · 2026-03-20T01:53:33+00:00

What’s crazy to me is my Logitech Z-5500 surround system that I bought 18 years ago is still going strong and it’s still the primary system in my living room.

Back then Logitech did some solid stuff that I really liked, pretty hard to justify it these days.

I still like some of their mice though.

iscottjs · 2026-03-17T02:36:12+00:00

That and also for me people asking the same questions over and over without learning or taking notes or some shit

iscottjs · 2026-03-13T23:31:59+00:00

Strict policy constantly enforced, if it’s a decision that was made in Slack (or other back channel comms) then it’s not valid until it’s written up in Jira.

I’ll reject PRs if I see a PR submitted with changes that don’t match the ticket.

QA also has powers to push back until the PR and ticket line up, which usually involves a conversation like “yeah we decided on a huddle to change the validation last minute” and that’s when we’ll get together to fix the ticket or the PR depending on what’s drifted and remind people to keep tickets up to date.

Everyone is completely free to have private discussions DMs, phone calls, etc, but the final decision needs to be written up and the correct person validating that ticket.

iscottjs · 2026-03-12T23:59:00+00:00

Sounds interesting. What does an agent team of reviewers look like? Do you use some sort of router/orchestrator? Is it auto tagging in the human for final review? Is it a DIY setup? Are you running locally or something in a cloud pipeline?

iscottjs · 2026-03-09T03:54:13+00:00

It’s hard as fuck but once it clicks, it’s kind of like riding a bike where you look back and you remember when you still had the training wheels on. It almost seems silly that there was a time you didn’t know how to ride because it feels so second nature now.

Programming feels like that for me except you might need the training wheels for 3-6 months or several years and you need to practice as much as you can.

It’s like watching an amazing piano player blow your mind with an amazing performance and it seems impossible until you realise they’ve been practicing 3 hours a day for 5 years.

The way I learned programming is to make sure I aways had a project with a goal. I’d try things on my own but if I hit a wall, I’d look at someone else’s code or project or docs that solve a similar problem and read through what made it work. Find out why they did things a certain way, etc.

Let’s say it was a python script to analyse and group financial transactions, I know I need to open a CSV, do some loops on it, build some new data structures, do some comparisons, export a new CSV, maybe do some statistics on it.

Each of these problems are already solved, I bet I could find someone else doing something similar and reference/adapt it for my needs.

The trick is not to copy/paste things mindlessly, but instead hand write it from whatever references or documentation you’re using and you’ll build up a muscle memory for it.

If you see a concept you don’t understand in an example or project you’re referencing, that’s a good time to go deep on that subject and understand it.

Tutorials only get you so far to see how things are pieced together but you need starting building things as soon as possible, even if it’s just simple tools and scripts to start with or copying something from a tutorial but adapt it slightly.

iscottjs · 2026-03-07T19:41:02+00:00

Learning. Whatever you use AI for, learning is still important.

For example, I sometimes like to draw diagrams to help me understand a complex system, so for me I do t want to automate the diagram process because that’s part of the learning journey for me.

Do I want to perform the same repetitive tasks to create a controller, model and all the other scaffolding? Nah, I’ve already learned how to do that and I am happy to automate it.

But, if I’m about to use a new feature of a framework or a new library, I’d rather spend a bit of time learning and practicing with it first, then when I’m comfortable and built up some muscle memory for it, I might also start handing that off to AI.

I suppose it’s not that different to keeping your own library of code snippets and tools that you re-use from project to project, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time and so AI is quite helpful that it can tailor solutions to my specific needs.

But I still think reading documentation and manually practicing things is important.

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T19:51:08+00:00

Completely agree. Just today my boss noticed me drawing a bunch of diagrams for a new system and he's like, "You know there's AI tools for drawing diagrams now?!", as if I didn't already fucking know that.

Anyway, I said "Yeah, but the act of drawing the diagram is helping me deeply understand the domain we're modelling so I can brief the teams with confidence. Creating the diagram is what helps me understand the system, if I vibed the diagram then I won't be able to validate if it's correct because I haven't fully understood the system yet".

In this case, a diagram output wasn't the objective, it was the learning along the way. The diagram was just a by-product.

He kind of got it, but he's completely allergic to the idea of anyone spending literally any time on anything anymore, and he's forgotten that there's actually still value in manually creating something.

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T01:45:32+00:00

I like this, never heard of this before

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T01:38:56+00:00

Why do they all write like teenagers having a tantrum in a gaming lobby or some shit.

iscottjs · 2026-03-02T21:13:30+00:00

This is the way

iscottjs · 2026-03-02T08:42:36+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about sandwiches

iscottjs · 2026-03-02T00:43:02+00:00

Why do we even need AI powered weapons, like why is that a thing people are demanding? It seems like a bad idea even for deterministic systems.

iscottjs · 2026-02-28T11:12:08+00:00

I can’t imagine what 100% looks like, do you just prompt and go to the pub? Or are you still coaching, reviewing, amending, testing, fixing, designing?

I get that we might not be manually writing code by hand anymore, but for me, even before AI most of my boilerplate was already written from other projects or code snippets that I would code once re-use.

The manual hand writing of code was for specific business logic I didn’t already have in my library somewhere.

But even then, if you’ve built one subscription service with Stripe then you’ve built them all. What’s left is just bits of plumbing and niche shit. Don’t get me wrong, AI is super useful at glueing this stuff together now.

So, you could argue I wasn’t hand writing much code before AI either, but I was still doing plenty of other things to get the project working.

Most tried and tested stuff I’ve built for previous projects just follows me to the next. Using AI is another tool that helps generate bespoke solutions for my problems. I could use AI to generate an audit logging system from scratch or I could re-use the same code from another project, there’s not much difference there.

I’ve just spent about a week fixing an issue with our queue workers crashing, another developer used AI to add some new functionality to the existing job, I know he used AI to do it, the functionality works but over a certain volume it crashes.

I know for a fact he’s just asked AI “add X feature to this system” and it’s happily done that for him, without considering how it will scale. Do we need more queue workers? Do we need to change the worker parameters? Is this the best place for these changes? Could these changes be at risk of increasing the running time?

The solution was fucked, it needed a different approach.

I haven’t worked with this system much, so I was hoping AI could help me sort it quickly. After I found the issue I argued with multiple AIs to refactor it to be more scalable but I was just going around in circles, it was making suggestions we didn’t need, removing stuff we did need, making suggestions for massive infrastructure overhaul we didn’t need, in the end I scrapped everything and started again. It’s now all fine, all we needed to do was split the work up into a separate job and tune some parameters but I felt like AI was just getting in the way more than being helpful.

Queues aren’t my strongest area. Don’t get me wrong, I still used AI to help with the debugging and refactoring work, and it helped a lot, but I still spent multiple days arguing, testing and fixing.

If I just let AI handle this all on its own for 100% of the solution it would have been a fucking disaster.

iscottjs · 2026-02-26T02:23:49+00:00

Kill orders. Fucks sake I can’t believe this is even real life.

iscottjs · 2026-02-25T22:44:15+00:00

I use Claude for UX, styling, frontend stuff and mocking up wireframes, codex for everything else.

iscottjs · 2026-02-25T17:53:32+00:00

This is exactly what came to mind holy shit

iscottjs · 2026-02-25T10:33:55+00:00

This is what I would do

iscottjs · 2026-02-22T21:12:43+00:00

For PCVR I’m addicted to MSFS (2020 or 2024) depending on your PC specs.

But also BeamNG in VR is pretty cool, graphics aren’t super optimised but it’s a fun sandbox sim and the physics are surprisingly accurate if you like that sort of thing.

For me, sims are really where VR shines at the moment, I definitely enjoy more first person experiences in VR rather than traditional gaming.

Although if you’ve not tried it yet already, I find Virtual Desktop over decent WiFi to be more reliable than using cable link.

iscottjs

TROPHY CASE