Good testers

Good testers are rare and they worth their weight in gold... Unfortunately true...

I have seldom seen good testers. Probably because most of them were hired as last resort. With a few exceptions all testers I have interacted were sub-mediocre students or self sufficient professionals that did not knew much about their jobs. I have seen testers that were testing quite delicate subsystems without understanding them, or making affirmations on operating systems without understanding the difference between processes and threads.

A big surprise for me came in another organization that had separate development and testing departments, the latter being seen as a service for the former. C'mon - we are pushing the same boulder upwards... Their job was mainly to delay or even stop releasing products by applying the most complicated methodology possible and spicing it up with almost nonsense (keyword based testing, test vision, test concept, and several other esoteric concepts).

The goal of testers is to discover bugs - either manually or automatically (praise the SDETs) but not hindering the work of the developers as without developer's work they would be useless. They are for sure an equal part in the team and their work is the key factor for quality - but testers that are only descoping are a pain in the ass.