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Is Bughunting Still A Way Into the Games Industry?
Edge Online is reprinting an article from last month's issue of the British gaming magazine. In the article, Bug Hunt, they look at the role of the modern QA tester. While once a good way to make yourself known to the company's HR staff, it's more and more simply a summer gig between classes for college students. They also discuss the hard working conditions, soul-crushing scheduling, and the public misconception that what a QA tester does involves the word 'play'. From the article: "Anyone with any experience of the QA process will deny the slightest resemblance between testing a game and playing one for pleasure: finding bugs is unmistakably work, and, by common consensus, very dull and repetitive work at that. On top of this, pay is often poor, job security frail, working conditions extreme and recognition hard to come by. So why do it?"
I worked for QA at a major US developer for 3 years (2 of which in a Sr. position) and I have to say that this article does not exaggerate, If anything it was being nice.
The hours are just as terrible as they say in the article, but unlike in the article after the seven months of non stop crunch hours there was no month off, maybe a few days to a week, then you either got fired or moved to another project to start it all over. The equipment is always substandard and often broken. The working situations are always way too cramped. We went even given cubicles; we worked in long rows of tables pressed up against each other so close that 2 people could back up their chairs at the same time.
Using QA as a stepping stone or entry point is no longer an option at all, from what I have seen. Many developers have a very negative image of the people in QA. Out of the 100 people they hired to test probably about 20-40 are actually talented testers, and less then half of that have development skills. Because of this there has been a growing thought that if you work in QA you don't have the talent needed for development work. I have seen people get turned down from a development jobs purely because they currently worked in QA. If you want to make games, you're better off working any normal full time job and making demos/designs docs in your spare time.
Now that I am no longer working for that developer I have much more family/free time, am able to work on my own projects again, and make nearly twice as much as I did while I was in QA (I'm now working in education)
My suggestion for everyone who ever thought about moving into QA, Don't.
QA certainly IS a track into the games industry, but depending on where you go it may not get you a development position. QA falls into two categories: publisher QA and developer QA. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Publisher QA tends to track into Production. This is like Hollywood production in that you are a facilitator between the publisher and the developer. You may or may not be an asshole, either seems to work (just so that I make my bias clear from the start). A good producer is invaluable and does have some power in tipping the balance between a game that is decent and one that is exceptional. A bad one can make a dev team's life a living hell. But it is a profession all on its own. Producers must be excellent communicators, have management skills, be diplomatic, understand scheduling, have enough of a grasp of the technical demands to know what to ask of their assigned team, and be able to navigate labyrinthine publisher politics. The turnover rate is high. It is very much a "people" position and its closest analog on the dev side is mangagerial. Getting back to the article, QA definitely is a path toward a production job. But most people applying to QA hoping to get into the industry aren't looking to be producers, and probably haven't even thought about it. The track goes something like Temp Tester -> FT Tester -> Lead Tester -> Assistant Producer -> Producer, with each tier culling out increasing numbers of candidates. The other thing about publisher QA is that publishers will tend to just grab anyone off the street and throw them into a QA position. You get high school dropouts and PhDs alike working QA. Moving up to a full time position (QA almost invariably starts temp) is like making it through a firing squad; rough numbers from people I've talked to seem to show that about one in twenty will move up. But because so many people enter QA just as a side job -- with no intention of continuing in the games industry and often very little technical ability whatsoever -- those odds aren't that bad. It should be noted, too, that occasionally publishers will loan out people with technical ability from the QA ranks to fill in scripting help and the like with their developer studios. This is a good opportunity for advancement but generally is a resume padder and not much else; the dev house ultimately will be doing its own recruiting and not necessarily pull from the publisher's QA (they may not even be able to, depending). Development QA, for one thing, is much more difficult to find. Increasingly QA is done by the publisher and the publisher alone, because it's more efficient (economically). The publisher is also the one that ultimately is giving the approval on the milestone and final product, so they want to have their own in-house resources doing quality testing so that they can monitor them and ensure quality of the testing itself. A dev house with its own QA department, meaning people that ONLY do QA, is either very big or very unusual. A big developer will run a QA department very similar to the publisher's, and sometimes worse; QA at Electronic Arts are literally fenced off from the rest of the developers and are treated with zero trust, herded in and out and highly restricted on what they can bring into the building. This is because they are temps, and when you have to cycle so many people through, you quickly tap regional talent resources and have to start hiring people off the street, which many companies don't seem to mind because their QA practices mostly involve having people play the game over and over again and report where it breaks, a very primitive form of QA that still persists in the industry but is slowly being augmented by automation, and, in some rare and ahead-of-the-curve places, better actual production practices in managing QA testing teams. These usually involve keeping testers on full time, though, which companies do not like to do because they perceive the job to be 'unskilled' and therefore don't want to pay for things like health insurance and other ful