Toxicity towards QAs from others
I'm QA Automation (or rather SDET, but no one is using this term here in Poland) with 10 years of experience. And at this point, I don't know if I'm the person with very bad luck, or all those companies/projects that respects QAs are like unicorns - everyone heard about them, but no one has ever seen them.
about me: my first interview was for Python dev, and I got the position but I got "temporarily" moved to QA for 3 months to help there, and for many reasons I was never able to switch to dev.
In literally all my companies, QAs are looked down upon, not always taken seriously, and generally treated as second-class citizens. Few examples from many companies I worked for:
- as trainee and later junior in first company I suggested small improvement in our infra, but dev laughed at me and told me to get back to my testing... only to later do it, and promote as his improvement, but I learned it when I already left the company
- dev was treating us, QAs, as idiots. He was rejecting our real bugs with no real explanation and when asked for it, he was mentioning something that he knows better, because he's dev and not QA. And when we raised it to management, they agreed with him with explanation that... he's dev so he has to know what he's talking about and they suggested us to get back to work
- during very serious situation, when company's wearable failed, and it lead to death of one person, CTO asked everyone to start testing it. One "senior dev" literally laughed loud that he's not stupid to do testing, and other one said that he'll do test automation so we (QAs) can have more time for manual testing, because his honour doesn't allow him to do testing. He knew shit about our stack.
- and current situation, with start of the new phase of the project, I needed some way to change 2 urls in the config for local testing. So I suggested how to do it, because no dev had time, clean solution, and what would give me lots of flexibility for many scenarios. Our "tech lead" rejected it and told me, he will prepare something that he likes, indirectly saying that QA peasant will not suggest him, how to do his work because he's the one with phd. His solution was the worst thing he could do both for QA perspective but also BE code.
And at this point, I really can't stand it anymore. Literally in all my companies QAs are second-class citizens who are always mocked, ignored and not taken seriously. And it's not only me, because my friends have similar views.
What about you? How do you fight back? Or maybe it's just me who has such opinion?