From Joel Spoksky's latest blog post "
Why Testers?"
... You don’t have to be a programmer to be a tester. A lot of companies want testers to be programmers who write automated test suites. It seems more efficient that way. This reflects a misunderstanding of what testers are supposed to do, which is evaluate new code, find the good things, find the bad things, and give positive and negative reinforcement to the developers. Sure, automated test suites are a time saver, but testing software covers so much more than that. If you put too much emphasis on those scripts, you won’t notice misaligned text, hostile user interfaces, bad color choices, and inconsistency. Worse, you’ll have a culture of testers frantically working to get their own code working, which crowds out what you need them to do: evaluate someone else’s code. ...
Joel's Company,
Fog Creek Software, has an opening for a software tester
right now.
If you'd like to work for a company that
actually gets software testing, that is
actually hiring right now, and you want to live in the New York City Area, check it out.