Engineer here - All I do is test other peoples work, never design my own

Question

Been at the company 4 years (1 year intern, 3 years after graduating). I used to do lots more design work but the last year or two all I ever do is test other peoples work. When I say test, I mean, pressing a button and writing the result down, that's it.

I have told management this many times but nothing changes, and this type of work is demotivating. Day in, day out, test, test, test.

What am I to do? I am becoming rusty in my actual trade because I rarely do it. All the valuable jobs are absorbed by seniors and all the rubbish they don't want to do I seem to get. I don't mind the company, they don't put much pressure on me, I'm just always bored out of my mind and never doing anything cognitive. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Since you've expressed your concerns to management and nothing has come of your conversations your best option, now, is to look for another job.

In lieu of that (and in lieu of knowing why you're in this situation) maybe one thing you could do is try to do some of the projects that you're testing in your free time. Try to do them better than and faster than the person that's assigned to them and then tell management about what you've been doing. The idea being that maybe showing initiative and quality work will reingratiate yourself with management.

Answer 2

There are a couple of related solutions that don't include finding a new job.

One is to find your motivation within yourself. And ride it out until eventually you're looking at someone doing all your testing. Because this is just how it goes sometimes. Someone has to do the drudge work it's part of the learning process. And it's valuable in itself learning how to stay motivated and professional.

The second is to get involved without being told to. As an engineer I had plenty of time between my early mundane work to go hang around more senior engineers and check out their projects. Eventually I was assisting them. Then doing the same as them, a bit further down the track I was in charge of them.

You get out what you want if you put in the effort so long as you're focusing on a goal rather than swimming with the flow.

Answer 3

It is an ugly scenario where you get more and more stuck with things you don't want to do, after a while it becomes hard to get other offers because:

1. You have worked too long, so you are not a junior any more.
2. You have to little experience in the areas you want to work with so no one wants to hire you as a senior.

Some options:

1. Find a new job. (If it's not already too late.) Make sure to be very, very clear what you want. Otherwise someone might read your CV as "experienced tester" and you will end up doing similar stuff again.
2. Talk to management again. Do not accept some vague "we will try to assign you some other tasks soon", instead you should insist on a detailed, documented plan, e.g. how much time should you spend on testing vs. development now, three months from now, and one year from now.
3. Declare that from now on you refuse to spend more than 50% of your time on testing regardless of what you are told. They might fire you but then someone else will need to do 100% of the testing instead of 50%...
4. Start automating tests, figure out how to improve testing, be proactive, become the best damn test leader in the world. But if you want to be a developer it will still suck.
5. Become depressed. Call in sick twice a week, do a slow & crappy job, tell your manager how much you hate your tasks. This is very likely to backfire, especially if you are in a country where you can easily be fired. But I have seen a few cases where people were assigned other (better) tasks in such scenarios. (But I'm in a country where it is expensive to fire people.)

Answer 4

Find a new job.

OP said (emphasis added):

I have told management this many times but nothing changes, and this type of work is demotivating. Day in, day out, test, test, test.

What am I to do? I am becoming rusty in my actual trade because I rarely do it. All the valuable jobs are absorbed by seniors and all the rubbish they don't want to do I seem to get. I don't mind the company, they don't put much pressure on me, I'm just always bored out of my mind and never doing anything cognitive. Any ideas?

This described my situation 6 yrs ago pretty perfectly. Here's what I did:

1. I brought a personal laptop to work, found a private place to eat lunch, set up a wifi hotspot from my cell phone, and began doing personal projects for 1 hr each day over lunch. I developed and got better at my actual trade during this time.

   I don't mind the company, they don't put much pressure on me

   If this is true, you might actually consider increasing those lunch breaks to 1.5 hrs, OR leaving work 1.5 hrs early, OR coming in 1.5 hrs late to work on personal projects during that extra time too. Don't make this permanent, though--the goal is to leave when ready, not stay there working reduced hours and harming your employer by doing so.

2. I spent every spare second of my evenings, weekends, and holidays developing my skills and doing design projects I really cared about.

3. I looked for other jobs, left, and got hired at a top tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm still in this process of developing skills and finding my right fit, but I'm on the right path.

I recommend you do the same: get skills, go interview, get out and move on. Keep in mind each interview is an opportunity to get skills and identify weaknesses too. If you fail an interview, identify why, study like crazy, and have that hole filled prior to the next one. Eventually, you will have filled enough holes you will land a job where you are the DOER, not the TESTER.

The idea of "putting in your time" is nonsense. You don't have to "put in your time" doing something you don't want to do for years. Rather, find a way to do what you really want to do. So long as you are or can become good at it, and can make money at it, go follow your dreams to get a job you are passionate about.

Answer 5

Some ideas, other than quitting.

• If it is possible, automate the testing, or come up with tools to at least reduce the effort
• slow down, complain that you need help, get an intern or apprentice, train them to do it better than you
• find fewer defects, point out a cost savings by changing internal requirements so that less testing needs to be done. [Note- This is a very mean thing to do, takes advantage of the worst instincts of a modern business. A last resort in an corp culture where good faith is already completely absent].
• work extra for a little while just to show that you can do something else (combine with item below)
• rather than asking management, ask coworkers to include you in other work. start by doing "undesirable" parts of something that is not testing, then try to move up within that work area.

(these can be combined, other than the first two)

Answer 6

From your description i see 2 options

1. Look for another job that promises development - not recommended
2. Get a hobby / freelance project in the field you want to refresh your skills - best IMHO

Steady job gives you paycheck and extracurricular activities will help you advance your skills and knowledge in the field you want

Little caveat thou:

Balance your work and watch out for burnout :)

Answer 7

You can't change anything about this situation now. You should have pushed back the first time you were told to work as a tester.

One possible way out: Work slower. Try to reduce the amount of testing work you get by being less productive. At the same time, actively look for the kind of work you like.