A topic other than the software testing romance -- the embarrassment of testing personnel recruitment

Recently, there have been many reports about the recruitment of Software testers, although some of them originated from the hype of a training center in Beijing, but the reality is very close-it is difficult to recruit professional and qualified software testing engineers, and it is embarrassing to recruit software testing personnel. In recent years, software testing has been paid more and more attention in China. There are two main reasons: l many foreign software enterprises have entered China, these enterprises have attached great importance to software quality and have invested a lot in software testing, with the development of the domestic software outsourcing industry, a complete testing team is established to undertake more and more software projects in Japan, the United States and other places, requiring more testers and many outsourcing enterprises, it starts from software testing.

However, at present, there are only a few software schools in Chinese universities, such as the software College of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, "Software Quality Assurance and testing. Most general universities do not even set up software testing courses. Fortunately, all 35 software schools in key universities offer software testing courses. However, the difference between the talents outputted by the Software Institute and the social needs is very large. More importantly, the Professional Software Testing Technology requires a lot of practical accumulation, that is, high requirements for teachers and practice bases.

There are many software testing training units in the society, but there are not many training units that can cultivate qualified talents required by enterprises. Most training courses are either short-term or lack of good practice bases (Standard medium and large software enterprises ). What's even more fatal is the lack of qualified teaching teachers, because the company has done a good job in testing engineers and managers, generally do not want to become a teacher, usually busy working, and rarely go to part-time jobs.

Qualified software testing talents are quite lacking. One example is very convincing. Over the past years, we have recruited nearly 300 testing engineers, only 2% of new users have performed professional tests (although 10-20% people have done the test, but not professional or not standard enough, not full-time), mainly rely on their own training. The number of testers of a foreign-invested software enterprise can exceed the number of testers of all software enterprises in the province (a relatively backward province.

In addition, one of the main causes of embarrassment is the misunderstanding or prejudice in the society. The author thinks that software testing is mainly a functional testing (black box testing), which has low technical requirements for personnel, as long as you are "careful and conscientious", testers can be well recruited. In fact, it is not the case that qualified software testing engineers are more difficult to recruit, especially senior test engineers and test managers. Sometimes it may take more than half a year to hire a test Manager. Most skilled and experienced programmers are reluctant to engage in the software testing industry. Another factor here is the salary policy of domestic enterprises. People of the same level may be given 4 K for software testing, or 5 k for development. Foreign-funded Enterprises will be better in this regard. In foreign countries, this gap is even smaller.

As mentioned above, the "one-to-one difficulty" of software testing should be rare, but in reality, paradox exists. For example, there is a recruitment position-"senior test engineer", because it is difficult to recruit, have to reduce the conditions, so that candidates who do not meet the "senior test engineer" is rejected. In turn, it also creates an impression that senior test engineers, "as it turns out, are no different from ordinary developers, which is equivalent to lowering the" test engineer "level. This is the embarrassment of testing personnel recruitment. The market demand performance is not consistent with the actual operation of the company.

A more interesting story is the story that an old friend in Shanghai told me five or six years ago. At that time, his company planned to recruit software testing engineers. The boss suggested that the general (elementary and intermediate) testing engineers should start from 3000 (RMB) and senior testing engineers should start from 3600, the Development (programming) Engineer's starting salary is 4000 ,... the result was strongly opposed by the old man. He would rather not recruit "senior test engineers" than "General-level" test engineers. This is also lucky. Once implemented, people living in the testing world will not be able to lift their heads for at least a few years.

Fortunately, everything is changing. The positions of test engineers are getting better and better, and senior test engineers are getting better and better ......
To eliminate such embarrassment, we need to eliminate social prejudices. The software testing community must work together to create an appropriate environment, more importantly, each test engineer needs to create his/her core value-both skill and experience-that is irreplaceable.

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