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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 1 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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strict9 ◴[15 Jan 20 21:06 UTC] No.22058568[source]▶
Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years.

In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage.

But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs, though usually with mixed results.

For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.

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weberc2 ◴[15 Jan 20 21:21 UTC] No.22058762[source]▶
I wonder if it's improvements in automation or if QA responsibilities are increasingly rolling up into standard developer roles or because the line between QA and dev is blurring (e.g., software testing now requires stronger dev/automation skills so the QA job looks more like standard software engineering)?
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1. xemdetia ◴[15 Jan 20 22:25 UTC] No.22059485[source]▶
I agree with the concept that it is turning into something else, as I see DevOps/SRE/CI/PM people doing QA work through trying to just make the thing go. It just is leaving a lot of gaps in longevity, complex setup, and building tests either manual or automated to do that better. In the last dozen or so teams I've interfaced with this is just getting worse as I'm seeing lots of situations where things like backup/restore breaks from the last hotfix, upgrade a system a few sequential versions, and only covering X-1/X critical features in ordinary testing. These are things that a traditional QA team would cover after it burns the business/org in one way or another, but since it's not a core focus of some of these people covering parts of the same role it's leaving a lot of not-obvious gaps in a lot of groups.