MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

To add to that from a corp perspective. Do not let them work you for free, ever. "foot in the door" is code for "we are going to get free work out of you and never call you back here is a free t-shirt we had in the back room in a box". The best you can hope for in that situation is meeting others who are doing the same as you and they remember you at the next job.

Game testing sounds cool but like you point out QA is a grueling thankless task. Most QA work is. Where you are trying every combination of different things just to get that one weird crash. In this case you will not be hanging out playing games. But going down a punch list and making sure everything works. You will do that same thing 200 times in a row. You will be playing a broken game as it is not done yet. Which everyone knows is a frustrating time.

As a dev I always try to make sure my QA peers are well taken care of. They are the ones who can make or break my software shipping on time. I try to always make time for them to make sure I understand what they are doing. I tell the other devs 'they are the ones using your broken code and they are frustrated and just want someone on the dev team to listen to them'.

In the corp world they are 100% trying to get rid of QA. It is being pushed back onto the developers with testing devop methodologies. I always point out to developers, a good QA person will try every combo and tell you how to reproduce it when it breaks. It is a different skill set.

Also do not let them shine you on with ideas of 'promotion from within' That usually does not happen. Most people jump to other companies to get promotions anymore. Which is kind of sad but the reality of it. It can still happen but it is more rare.

If you are looking to start in the QA area to move into dev work look at making test automation scripts. Groovy, Lua, Python, HPQ, soapui, etc. A reproducible test is easier to fix than 'uh I held the button down and it broke'. When you apply at your next job and it is for a dev they will want to know 'can you code'... Testing automation looks decent on someone trying to move up.