Testing can be a satisfying and fun career choice, but in order to grow you need to find a way through the thickets of self-promotion by high-profile consultants and forests of low-quality discussion. There are isolated island communities of folks trying to push the craft forward, but they're doing it without much current or historical context. You need to build your own synthesis. Frankly the field is a mess and it's no wonder testing is held in such low regard.
The reason I'm targeting automation is that it tends to be done really badly in most companies. At the moment I feel I do it pretty well but always seek to improve. At the moment I don't feel like I'm improving much and want to avoid things staying static for long. Therefore I'm trying to re-evaluate the basics or gain new insight and get back on track
I'd be curious if HN think the above includes things that shouldn't be there or is missing a number of items? I'd be curious what the 80/20 for an automation engineer looks like?
Understanding the build system and devops in general is important because if the teams you work with use continuous integration then the test systems interfaces with it.
I work on a team dedicated to making build and automated test reporting better (see my profile) so obviously I have an interest here but I think great reporting is often overlooked and it's crazy because all of the effort involved in automation and writing tests is only valuable if everyone can see the benefits and resolve failures immediately.
