My Biggest Testing Regret - MoT Bloggers Club June 2021

This is another blog post inspired by Bloggers Club June 2021 - if you are a tester (or interested in testing) be sure to check out the Ministry of Testing, it's wonderful community of smart and helpful people and their forum (called the Club) is great place to get help, get inspired and to discus stuff to stimulate those little grey cells. This month's topic idea appealed to me straight away. I try not to have regrets, per say, but there I decisions from the past that, from today's perspective, I would have made differently.If I could, pretty much only thing I would have done differently is that I would have left support sooner (I worked in tech support for about two and a half years) and gotten into testing sooner. I spent a lot of time trying to find myself, I was learning WordPress and doing freelance consulting, learning Angular, React, PHP, Java, .NET/C# and other development technologies, mostly (but not exclusively) front-end oriented. I recently blogged about how I almost left QA/testing for a career in web development, since I had the wrong impression about testing in general. So, no need to go over that again in detail.

While learning web development I came to a realization that while I like to code, this was not the only thing I liked doing in IT. Unexpectedly changing companies, for a testing position, instead of a role of a front-end developer I was aiming for, had an eye-opening effect on me. Testing, when done right, offers a lot interesting and various activities with someone who is not interested in doing just one thing - I guess I'm a generalist at heart. 

I sometimes get those what-if moments where I start to think of where would I be today, in terms of testing knowledge if I dedicated my whole career to it right from the get-go. At the time I'm writing this (middle of 2021) I'm sort of a mid-level tester, I've been a tester for around four years, give or take. Up till now if my first IT job was being a tester, instead of working in tech support, I would had almost twice as much experience! I could have been some big-shot test architect or a test coach, maybe. Or would I? 

These kind of thoughts are sometimes hard to avoid, but to be honest, this way of thinking will do you no good - you can't change the past, well, at least not until a reliable time travel gets invented, but, what you can do is simply draw lessons from it to prevent yourself from making future decisions you may come to regret.

That's all from me this time, peace, I'm out!