Let me Have Some Job Security if I’m Going to be a Corporate Slave.

You’d assume that having been a Corporate Slave for almost 16 years you’d at least get some assurance that you’ll be in that job until you decide to move on to the next or retire.

Just this week, a bunch of my co-workers were given notice. It’s been months of constant restructuring and I remember myself grumbling that I had to adjust twice this year because I was moved to two different teams. In retrospect, I was lucky. Those two transfers secured me my job, for now.

It’s still worrisome when you see the phrase “you are replaceable” in actual practice. Any company can just kick you out and give some passable enough reason for them not to get sued. They also have the advantage of being able to afford lawyers while you sit there and just accept your fate.

Working in Tech means you have to adapt to the current trends to keep up. What we sometimes forget is that companies do the same. They want to be up to date with ever will seemingly make their clients happy.

We all know what I mean: AI. It’s a helpful tool when used correctly but too much reliance on it without proper checks will eventually pull everyone down. It’s even in the training they made us do: AI output needs to be checked to assure correctness. Removal of the people who do those checks is not the smartest move.

You know what AI also use? Data. Lots of good quality data. What happens if you feed AI with lots of data without standards and audits? Faulty results.

It’s only a matter of time before everything falls down. They’re removing QA from the earliest part of the development cycle because “AI can do the tests faster” or “developers can do QA using AI”. For those who don’t know, testing and “QA” are not the same thing. They might be used interchangeably but they’re not the same.

One of the fundamental testing principles is early testing. Early testing prevents issues and unnecessary work as early as the requirements gathering phase. By removing QAs from planning, they’re essentially just hoping that no bugs will be found during regression testing which, let’s be real, is never going to happen (another testing principle).

Changes and fixes gets to the customers faster but at the expense of the quality. What customer would want an issue-riddled application?

I wish companies would stop joining the bandwagon to fix their problems. They should start looking at the actual root cause and maybe they’ll find out it’ll cost them less to fix it.