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No Graduation for Testers

Submitted by John McConda on Thu, 15/03/2007 - 23:36.
I'm going to get myself in trouble here, so let me preface this by saying I love my Mother-in-law. (Hear that Honey?) She's a very smart woman and meant nothing negative by her comment the other day, but she said something that got a laugh out of me because she had no way of knowing how insightful her words were about the perceived superiority of developers over testers.

We were all sitting around the dinner table. I was discussing the interviews my company has been conducting to find a new tester, and how we had changed our strategy of hiring testers since my arrival. I said that in the past, our firm had hired testers with the promise of "graduating" them to a developer position in a couple of years. When I mentioned that it was tough to lose testers to development she asked "When will you get to move up?"

I chuckled and got to explain that good testers who love their craft don't aspire to be developers, they aspire to be great testers. I don't plan on graduating anytime soon, but I may have just earned myself a night on the couch....
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To me, your previous hiring s

Submitted by SteveL on Fri, 27/07/2007 - 13:05.
To me, your previous hiring strategy has its pros and cons. Personally, I think that as a tester you should be able to write some form of code whether it be a loop, a switch, or whatever. The bad in your previous strategy tells me that as a tester, you'll never be regarded as an equal to a developer. The developer title will always be a step above the tester title. In actuality, they should be at the same level. I guess it has always been the mindset though that 'testers are useless' and all we do it pound on a keyboard.
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Stats

Submitted by John McConda on Mon, 26/03/2007 - 16:21.
Our 15 person company keeps 4 full time testers. We've hired 9 testers including myself since 2002, with four of those moving to Development, one leaving the company, and four of us continuing in testing. Keep in mind though that until last year, all testers were hired with the expectation that they would eventually be a developer.
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We should all aspire to be professional students

Submitted by cparks0225 on Tue, 20/03/2007 - 02:48.
I don't personally care for the term "graduating". It's a false mentality with a connotation of an end, when we all know that there's far too much to learn to consider having an end to the pursuit of knowledge and personal growth. I myself at one time aspired to become a developer, but realized that they make way too many mistakes and it's fun to be the one to catch them ;)

~Christopher
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And thats why your past hirin

Submitted by arushchak on Fri, 16/03/2007 - 11:01.
And thats why your past hiring strategy was not the best one..

By the way, can you please share any statistics on how much % of testers graduated to developers in your company?
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