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Discussion on: Will I still be called a developer?

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swarupkm profile image
Swarup Kumar Mahapatra • Edited

Fair Enough.
I started my career as a manual tester 6 years back.
Then found interest in python, and did scripting / selenium tests.
Then moved on to backend development(with Devops) where I found interest in OOPS, Design Patters, DDD and then System Design.
May be I found interest in those because it was part of my job.

DS and Algo implementation was never part of the job. However there are still companies who hire Developers on the basis of that. I can proudly say that I have never asked candidates on those topics directly, rather asked questions relevant to the position I am hiring for.

I was wondering why the industry is not moving away from that mindset, and pay more attention to topics like OOPS/Functional Programming, Clean Code, Design Patterns etc.

By the way I did go through the excellent MIT courses on DS and Algo using Python quite a long time back .
edx.org/course/introduction-to-com...
edx.org/course/introduction-to-com...

I was just trying to represent a bigger audience with my article :)

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seejaylamb profile image
CJ Lambert

I am at the point in my career similar to where you were. I have been manually testing for a few years now, found an interest in C# / automation and wrote my company's Selenium scripts that are still used today by myself and other testers.

Some devs in my company are a bit old school in their mindset imo. Recently the discussion of considering github for source control (or atlassian's bitbucket) in place of our current implementation of git. A dev said that a small repo should be used to try it out maybe, I mentioned the selenium repo.
He says "we should consider an actual used repo" or he may have said useful.
I understand it is not as widespread and used as some other same repos but give the codebase some credit. In hindsight I should have spoke up, but frustration got the best of me haha.

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swarupkm profile image
Swarup Kumar Mahapatra

Those "old school" guys I referred in my article. There is no empathy for people who are self starter and did something productive. Selenium scripts will always be useful to the team.

I can absolutely relate to your concern . When I wrote selenium code, I used to give the respect of production code and maintain the coding standards it deserves.

I had written a blog about it as well. You can have a look.

dev.to/swarupkm/test-automation---...

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seejaylamb profile image
CJ Lambert

Thanks for your response swarup. I will read over your referenced blog post on this as well at some point