When I first started getting introduced into the world of Quality Assurance, I didn’t know how vast the different areas are. I was a total noob and absolutely fascinated by how many possibilities there are to grow in the field — until now.
Back in 2017 when I wrote my first post on Medium (I am a Tester and I want to talk about it) I literally had no idea what I was getting myself into.
In the last one and a half years the company I work for started growing and from being one of three testers I became one manual tester between a bunch of automation engineers and actual quality assurance engineers. I felt like I was put into a catapult and sent back to square one.
I convinced myself that this was something good, that I could learn from my colleagues and step up the game of being ‘just’ a manual tester.
It did not exactly work out this way.
When I first started getting into test automation, everything I did felt like magic. You are probably asking yourself what’s so magic about it? The fact that I did something different after being stuck in my manual testing routines. I liked it, I was excited about it and I totally wanted to know more and to do more — until now.
The team started to change, the dynamics changed and all my efforts were not enough anymore. I had to go another way and I had to make steps back to fit into the new team structures. Besides that, the more time passed the more was expected. Nothing to be surprised about here, as usual things change and not always for the worse.
Struggling with my own issues, mental and personal ones, I had a hard time getting myself into it. I started feeling overwhelmed and impressed by so many talented and skilled people, that I started doubting myself and my skills.
We had several feedback rounds at work in regards to our annual development talks. The feedback I received hit me hard and I had a terrible time dealing with it. Some months later I realised that all the fuzz was just there to make some noise and to shaken up things.
After putting myself back in the game I noticed that my passion for the job was gone.
It’s been a few months now and I am trying to find out why this happened. There is one simple explanation to all of this and one single truth. Nothing did really happen to make me loose interest. I just lost it.
I could sit here for hours thinking about reasons and more complex explanations, but there isn’t any. It happens. You lose interest, you lose passion, you concentrate on other aspects of your life.
What are you supposed to do, when you are not willing to go that extra mile to stand out? Does that mean your work is not worth it anymore? Does that mean it is not enough? Why are we supposed to always do more, instead of being able to be steady and reliable in what we do?
Those and so many more questions are giving me the hardest time ever at work. I am supposed to talk, to show, to manage, to do, to listen, to speak up, sometimes also to do things I do not even feel comfortable doing — but that’s how you grow in what you are doing, right? I am not always sure about that.
Why did I write all this down? Maybe to be honest with myself and to see that it is nobody’s fault, if things don’t go the way we imagined. We are not forced to be on the same level as anyone else. We are all individuals, with different super powers, we just need to remind ourselves about that from time to time.
