Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 490: How do I break into software dev from QA automation and underselling

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, I’ve been in QA/QA automation for 13 years now with a CS degree, and I’ve been trying to change my role to a software developer for a while. My only issue is that every time I brought my career aspirations to my managers they seemed to “not care” or give vague answers to “kick the can down the road”. In the past I fully demonstrated I can do the work by submitting bug fixes, writing and deploying a few microservices by myself (all product feature work), on top of performing my QA duties. I get high marks in my performance reviews, but that doesn’t seem to be enough! I also seem to attract some resentment from my team (silently but it’s noticed) as they see a QA trying to soak up their dev work and I get a strong “stay in your lane” vibe. I do it to help them, not take all of their work. Any advice? Am I approaching this the wrong way? And what would you do in my situation? Thanks and all the best! Hi! Three years ago, I relocated from a third-world country to Europe for work. I tend to undersell myself a lot. I know I am a competent, hard-working, and smart engineer. I have strong opinions and can evaluate trade-offs. I can participate in discussions about complex systems, and I have experience managing projects. But sometimes I’m afraid of looking dumb and scared of confrontation. This means I rarely voice my opinions or suggestions. I often let go of them at the slightest objection, even if I believe the other person is mistaken. Whenever I speak or comment on a subject in Slack, I always use phrases like “I’m not 100% sure”, “as far as I remember”, or “I have to look it up but I think … “. These would not matter If I was showing my confidence through other means like participating in discussions confidently, but these all add up to create an image of someone reliable in getting things done, but not reliable at taking more responsibility. I was not like this before moving. Occasionally I struggle with the language when in big meetings or talking about complex matters, but I’m comfortable with English. It has an effect for sure, but it is not the cause. I’m going to start a new position and I want to have a longer career there. But I’m afraid that I can not give myself the head start I know I’m capable of. How can I improve my own personal onboarding process and let my new colleagues and manager know how lucky they are to have me on their team?

it takes more than interpreting the phrase resume building literally and generating your resume from a complicated cicd pipeline to be a great software engineer this is episode 490 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like the classic developer problem of looking at a thing and saying i know the solution is more technology this is like resume driven development to the extreme yeah yeah actual development problem with my resume is there's not enough code involved in the actual generation of it yeah exactly oh dave i have you said i'd sound like i have a turkey

hangover and i'll accept that explanation but out of love for the podcast i continue on yes hopefully you can stomach the the weird noises do you want to thank our patrons i do big thanks to those that are contributing at a level on patreon where we shout them out every single week they are ci issues charpente.io seth is begging for a review on his pr and hardware is a Mr. Porkchop. What? I don't know. I swear there's coded messages here.

I just haven't gone to the work of putting them all together. The next one is, Hey Siri, learn React testing at howtoptestfrontend.com with a party emoji and a pumpkin emoji or a jack-o'-lantern, I should say. Balance the parens,

but forgot the emoticons with a sad face emoticon. Always use neverendingstorypointer.com so I can. I fight actual fires as a hobby because it's so much less stressful than my tech job my actual name on linkedin is yammy debugging in the dark canny the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table myomics jacob's handling okay i'm ready to start my pairing session oh

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Maybe. If the service org uses a subservice org and the controls at the subservice org are necessary, pretend it's not. Javier Gonzalez, Chewy, Ted Timbrel, a single open paren, Dan from DroneDeploy, never is not just a crater on Mars flamingo emoji. Boy, that's a long, that is a classic long running one. We love it. I like chicken, I like liver, meowmix, meowmix, please deliver. Speaking of long runs, that's another beautiful one. Dave, you said you might come to the Swiss Python Summit, but you did not eventually.

Oh, I'm so sorry. Kyle Boss, Kent, C. Dodds, pause for dramatic effect. jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation i thought you pull fresh patreon names every friday um that's someone i think complaining about our frequency we did record on an off day yes we did at one point so yeah maybe you got caught in that cycle yeah maybe you did if will angel was good at self-promotion he would be a double senior staff engineer software's episode five benchmark culture crash strikes strikes back oh my gosh

star wars mashups with benedict cumberbatch batch name mispronunciations i love it brayden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis the words followed by a single closed parenthesis character thank you so much to those that contribute at this level you brighten our day lift our spirits and make our hearts swell which i did get checked by the doctor and they said it was all just good so ah the good swelling yeah your heart's getting ripped but for a good reason the doctor said this is more like a swole yeah you make dave's heart swole oh thank you thank you should i read our first question go for it this is from a listener named sad john oh oh dear hi dave and jameson i've been in qa and qa automation for 13 years now with a

cs degree and i've been trying to change my role to a software developer for a while my only issue is that every time i brought my my career aspirations to my managers they seem to not care or give vague answers to kick the can down the road in the past i fully demonstrated i can do the work by submitting bug fixes writing deploying a few micro services by myself all product feature work on top of performing my qa duties i get high marks in my performance reviews but that does not seem to be enough i also seem to attract some resentment from my team silently but it's noticed as they see a qa dev trying to soak up their dev work and i get a strong stay in your lane vibe i do it to help them not to take all their work any advice am i approaching

this the wrong way and what would you do in my situation thanks and all the best oh yeah qa automation there is definitely an interesting phenomenon where the qa automation role is kind of a an interesting one because the really great ones often do want to move into product development sometimes not always but often and when they do it it creates a void it creates a scarcity of really great automation engineers and so then like i maybe maybe this listener has experienced this but then i've noticed that they become an in-demand commodity because they're so rare and then they get they kind of can stay there for their whole career because the pay the pay is really good the company loves them and wants them to stay in that role and it sounds like in this

case the whole org kind of has a vibe that's pushing them to stay in this role yeah i thought that too maybe it's not about actively wanting to push you out of dev but more like how painful it will be to replace you if you move into dev yeah hmm not care or give vague answers to kick the can yeah not care give vague answers to kick the can down the road that could be a way of dealing with the pain of saying listen i know you might make more money and be happier in this role but it would make my life worse because then i would have to i would have to replace you and maybe i would do a poor job that would suck yeah you could try to address that and see if there's a way you can suss out if there are concerns about backfilling you if you were to move over

and then see if you can address those somehow maybe you could do some training on your team or or help with the hiring process or something get high marks in my performance reviews doesn't seem to be enough yeah i mean that that's exactly that's exactly what i think is happening from so there's two there's two groups of people here that are both pushing you to stay in the qa automation role your manager who you've expressly said i want to move into development and they're like, I really don't want that. And they're the ones, I think, Jameson, that you were thinking about when you said the pain of replacing you is so high. Because trust me, I know this. I've hired QA automation people for, I don't know, more than 10 years. And it is really hard to find great ones.

Yeah. And so that group of people is pushing you to stay, probably just one person. And then the developers are pushing you to stay as well. I don't know. This starts to lead me to say it might be time to go to a new place where the expectations are that you will be a product developer. What do you think of the vibes of stay in your lane? What I see is this person saying, no, I can do the work. Look at what I've done. And getting pushback from the team. I think I have a feel for what's happening there. And that is something that I've seen as well. So as an engineering leader, I will sometimes dive in and do little tasks like I'm going to add a little feature here, fix a little bug there. And it actually causes some trouble. And the trouble

it causes is we have a very carefully set up balance of different roles on a team, you have a certain number of developers who have a predictable velocity. And then you have sometimes QA people, you have engineering managers who are doing sprint planning. And you've got this whole system that's rolling along, you got UX designers and product managers that are all in a flow. and then some external force like a qa automation person comes in and goes hey i just i want to take this ticket and take care of it i'll help you and everyone around you is like oh crap okay that's going to be an extra ticket that our qa person has to validate this sprint that they weren't planning on and that what didn't get into our sprint planning and it's going to throw off our velocity

calculations and it's going to this and this and it's like people i don't know i don't know if the people are right in this mentality but they i think sometimes they can perceive that as a wrench in the gears of this well-oiled, finely calibrated machine that they've been working in. Yeah. If you see the work you do as purely positive, right? I did stuff. The stuff is done that was not done before. You are ignoring all of the associated costs that go with shepherding that work into production and the mental model changes that the team has to make to accommodate that work if you if you add some new microservices you change how the system works and even if you test them exhaustively and you're 100 sure that they work correctly there's still a bunch of

additional labor for the team as a whole that comes attached to that i've seen that same vibe play out as well well from myself and other engineering leaders where you chuck this big new thing over the wall and say good news i i did all this stuff that wasn't going to get done and it has a big cost to it also yeah i think it's still positive in many cases but it's not it's not purely positive right there are slowdowns that others will incur because of this work and if they haven't been part of the planning or the discussion on how it works then they have to kind of spin up and get the context on why you did it and why you did it that way and yeah it can i have seen that same vibe of it's not bad but it's unexpected and that can lead to some grumpiness

yep exactly you kind of get this forced context switch on you and that's why i think for you to make this change you have to have manager support to actually create a role for you where you are a normal recurring contributing developer on the team and not just someone who swoops in and does development tasks every once in a while but i i don't think this manager is going to be supportive based on your description here so you either got to find another team or another company where you can go do that where the expectation is actually well established and clear and aligned with what you want yeah i don't know if this is the case but i want to acknowledge it is still possible that you think no i got this i've proven i can totally do the work look i made these bug fixes

and there's still a big gap in either your actual skill or your demonstrated skill that you are not seeing or acknowledging possible and it can it can be hard to completely know until you're actually doing the work but i think it it's at least worth being aware of that you might think no i can i'm totally 100 ready for this and qualified for it and it's possible that you might not be but you might have some dunning kruger of you you just think you are because you don't know what you don't know about what is missing there yeah so i let's say if you do decide to leave this company how do you go about positioning yourself as a former qa automation engineer who's ready to transition into product development engineer and do you have to take a

pay cut to make this happen boy 13 years i mean a pay cut would probably make it easier or at least a level cut if you're if you're 13 years in qa automation you're probably fairly senior and maybe you're you're not gonna stack up well in senior software engineer roles but i think great junior developers come in unique shapes there's kind of just the pipeline of out of boot camp into the career out of the cs degree into the career and and those folks can be great junior developers but they also cannot and and so there's there's something unique in your background here that you've been around software development for a long time you've done qa automation you understand that really deeply and you also have less experience in in the direct kind of product

development stuff but that i think that can be an advantage like i i have this unique skill set that makes me stick out a little bit if i'm if i'm going into more junior roles that is true i guess I'm just saying yes with many words. Yeah, I think you will do better if you aim for more junior roles. Yeah. And I think you'll be a very attractive... I don't want to say junior, junior, but less senior role than you're in right now because you have so much experience working through the process. You know how product development works. You know a bunch of stuff about quality that a lot of less senior developers know. So you've got some advantages working for you and i do think you're going to have to take advantage of that and form a narrative that you

can talk about that makes you an attractive candidate to a job but i don't think you can stay at this company and do that or at least stay on this team and do that yeah well have we answered it i think so good luck good luck all right should i read wait no should you read our next question yes i will read this one this one comes from an anonymous listener who says hi three years ago i relocated from a third world country to europe for work i tend to undersell myself a lot i know I am a competent, hardworking, and smart engineer. I have strong opinions and can evaluate trade-offs. I can participate in discussions about complex systems, and I have experience managing projects. But sometimes I'm afraid of looking dumb and scared of confrontation. This means I rarely

voice my opinions or suggestions. I often let go of them at the slightest objection, even if I believe the other person is mistaken. Whenever I speak or comment on a subject in Slack, I always use the phrase like, I'm not 100% sure, or as far as I remember, or I have to look it up, but I think. These would not matter if I was showing my confidence through other means like participating in discussions confidently, but these all add up to create an image of someone reliable in getting things done, but not reliable at taking more responsibility. I was not like this before moving. Occasionally, I struggle with the language when in big meetings or talking about complex matters, but I'm comfortable with English. It has an effect for sure, but it is not the cause.

I'm going to start a new position and I want to have a longer career there, but I'm afraid that I cannot give myself the head start I know I am capable of. How can I improve my own personal onboarding process and let my new colleagues and manager know how lucky they are to have me on their team this is an awesome question that is a great question and your written english is fantastic i don't know what produced this maybe it's all the product of ai or something but yeah great writing that just reinforces the claim that english is english skills are not the cause of this issue yeah so agree hmm you know it's actually very interesting as i was reading the the question here especially the examples like things like i have to look that up or as far as

i remember i thought to myself boy life would be great if more people were like this you know if more people were honest about the uh the scope of their knowledge or the um the source of their understanding of things i think we have far too many people maybe not in engineering but in the in general who are willing to confidently assert a claim that actually is not based on sources or material that justify that confidence yeah sometimes that's a way of exploring a claim you sort of chuck it out there and see how it does sometimes it is kind of a sales politics bravado thing too of just i'm gonna i'm gonna win by being confident this is interesting i think i use some of these same phrases do you appreciate it when others use them or do you think oh lack

of confidence. No, I appreciate it. I think I appreciate it. I think it shows an honest inquiry for the truth, which of course I have a positive opinion about it because I do it. Wouldn't it matter if I was showing my confidence through other means? Hmm. Maybe we can talk about those other means, participating discussions confidently. So it's interesting that you bring up moving to Europe, English as a second language. i assume most people are speaking english as a second language in this case if you've moved to europe and you're doing business in english but it's like europeans that learn english and somehow i feel like their english is all better than native speakers often true but struggling to

appear confident in meetings i think is an evergreen topic and there's also a personality type that does really well at thinking quickly on their feet and vocalizing those thoughts in meetings and there there's a another or many other types where they sit and absorb and they have to ponder a little bit more and it's not going to be the real time like quick back and forth of exchanges of ideas and the perception in the meeting is not always the reality if you are a good writer which i believe you are from this question that can be one way you can demonstrate capability and confidence maybe you're not the one who is confidently asserting things in meetings and exploring the discussion.

But if you take time to ponder and think and you write up really great technical design docs based on the discussions or based on your unique take or thoughts after the discussions, that can show confidence and competence. Yeah, that's a really good point. Maybe the modality matters here

more than the actual content. Yeah, I'll tell you what, when I see an engineer take initiative and write up a really comprehensive, well-thought-out, well-articulated design doc that and of course i could go into like what constitutes a well-articulated like a quality design doc but when i see that i go oh wow this is good engineering yeah and that that speaks to my heart a hundred times more than a confident verbal response in real time yeah yeah thinking

carefully about trade-offs and why to make these specific ones and then explaining that clearly is invaluable oh yeah and if you say i considered these other three options and i discarded them because of these three reasons it's like oh wow this one this person did their homework and they really know what they're doing i can get behind that i love it yeah hmm i mean that doesn't help you in the moment if if you're just showing up at a meeting and and kind of trying to dive into the topic but again maybe you have other strengths that can show up or a speaker comment on a subject in slack hey you mentioned slack i cut this part out but they said they're it's a fortune 500 company so it's a giant company so i assume there's plenty of excuse me remote or asynchronous

synchronous communication. Yeah. Lots of time zones. So there should be room for writing stuff down. Exactly. That works in your favor. The other idea I have is if you do want some tips on how to verbally come across as more confident, it sounds like from the question, you've got a few phrases that you use that you feel like undermine your perceived confidence by the other people you're talking to. It could be that you need to replace some of those phrases rather than say, like, for example, I'm not 100% sure, which, by the way, I'm not 100% sure is actually not a useful phrase because no one is ever 100% sure about pretty much anything of any import. It just goes without saying I'm not 100% sure. It doesn't add anything. But if you could find replacement

phrases, like, for example, instead of saying I'm not 100% sure, you could say, based on my observation with X, Y, and Z, and then say your statement. So people know where your information is coming from. I like being on the receiving end of that because then people are telling me not only the claim, but also where it came from so that if there's newer information or if there's something wrong with the source of that information, I can weigh that in how I assess the information. But me, I'm never sitting there evaluating how confident someone appears. I'm always evaluating the accuracy and reliability of the information they're sharing. And so when I get meta i'll call it like meta claims or meta information it helps a lot and so if you can find

a way to substitute these confidence underminer phrases like as far as i remember or i have to look it up but i think instead just say like based on what i looked up or based on my recollection from this experience or based on what i observed when i tested this feature a week ago you know it's like ah that's useful information yeah a big one that i struggle with is apologizing a lot instead of saying thank you. This doesn't always work because sometimes you actually do have to apologize. Saying, hey, thank you for allowing me to hit your car is probably not, you probably do have to say, sorry, I ran into your car. But say you misremembered something and then someone corrects you in a meeting. You don't say, oh, I'm sorry I got that so wrong. You can say, oh,

thank you for correcting me. I appreciate the right information. And I think it communicates the sentiment of what you're trying to communicate effectively you're trying to say thank you effectively and acknowledge someone helping you but saying i'm sorry is sort of can come across as kind of cringing or weak in some way or i don't know you're you're focusing on your own failures instead of someone else's contributions yeah yeah i mean any even if we look at i have to look it up but i think you could change that into a thing you append at the end of a sentence so here's what i think i'll look it up to confirm and i'll get back to you exactly exactly so instead of putting it at the beginning and then you're sort of discounting what you're about to say

implicitly you you say and i'll provide even more certainty yes then you're you're signing up for a follow-up action that will improve the situation it'll improve the knowledge that everyone has yeah and i i love that i love that when people say hey i'll get back to you in one hour with more detail i'm like oh great thank you now i don't have to worry about it i know it's going to be taken care of yeah now we do have to address one useful thing you could do which is you if you're on zoom use some wild filter i don't know change yourself into a powerful jungle cat whoa the the jaguar is speaking everyone pay attention this engineer really is the king of the jungle yeah yeah i think you should try that explore that option i wonder i don't know of

anything out there but maybe there's some kind of llm ai speaking coach stuff because i feel like i imagine this is something you could pay an expert a lot of money to do just listen to my communication and then coach me on how i can appear more confident and instead you can turn on some spyware on your computer that records everything you say and then feed it to a slightly less expert expert that is just a computer that costs a lot less money i feel like that's a thing you could do i'm not endorsing any services but i'm sure they're out there nice yeah well maybe i'll make them and raise hundreds of millions of dollars awesome that's exactly what we need hundreds of millions of dollars yeah i assume you're talking for the podcast but you can you

can do it for your product too oh you know we don't just get that money i thought i'd give it to you like i thought i'd just give it to you so that you'll your idea is so good have a hundred million dollars i thought they were just buying the idea good luck what you mean to say when people say i raised 500 million dollars they didn't just they weren't just given that money man in a way they were my understanding of investment depending on how confident you are in meetings you probably could spend a lot of that money on just yourself for a while nice okay that's more like what i thought happened here's 100 million dollars because you did a really good PowerPoint.

Honestly, sometimes that sounds like how it goes. I'm not sure. I haven't been in those meetings, but hopefully there's a kernel of good idea. But demonstrate that you will do a good job on this idea probably does come down to you did a really good PowerPoint in some cases. Well.

Sort of like a hiring problem. You answered this whiteboard question well, therefore you must be good at software engineering. You presented a PowerPoint well, so you must be capable of stewarding this $10 million funding round. Here's $10 million with no strings attached. We'll never see you again.

Enjoy spending this money. Yeah. That's how that works, right? I think then they have to show up at your door with a camera crew and a giant check. That's how you get your funding round. It's publisher's clearing house. Giant novelty check made of cardboard.

Yeah, you won the lottery. No strings attached. That's how I imagine it. Okay, I think that means we're done. venture capitalists have a lot of fun with those novelty checks yeah now there's got to be a vc firm that presents funding with novelty checks and if not sounds like an opening in the market i agree an underserved area yeah listen we want more of your company and the valuation will be lower but think of how valuable a giant novelty check would be there will be a dollar amount on

it but you can't put a dollar amount on the value of a john on the value of you posting this photo on linkedin yeah yeah think about that so fun all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form we thank you to all those who have filled out that form and just absolutely filled our pipeline with wonderful questions we love reading them we mourn with you we laugh with you. We cry with you. We thank you for continuing to send those questions in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We'll catch you next week.