Is there still a career path for manual QA these days?

[Arete314159]

I became disabled a few years ago, and the most likely scenario for me is that I will stay on disability for the foreseeable future. But from time to time, I think about my halcyon days doing QA, which was a job I really liked.

This leads me to wonder -- is manual QA even a valid career path anymore? Or are these jobs being eaten by automation, AI, and the usual protestations that "devs do their own QA" and "we don't need QA"...in other words, forcing your users to become unpaid beta testers for a finished product and hoping for the best?

Just curious.

[khedoros1]

The last place I worked had manual QA teams, which covered parts of the testing that weren't easily automated. In particular, they had workflows to go through for each expected function in the UI.

I don't know how common that is anymore; as you've noted, a lot of companies de-emphasize the need for a dedicated QA team.

[0x3444ac53]

Hi! I work in manual QA at a financial institution. We have dedicated QA teams, and some of us also work towards automation. A lot of companies, where I work included, are often stuck in legacy systems that modern automation tools simply can't work with, and as a result require manual QA (or at least a dedicated team for automating).

I doubt you'll find anything at larger silicon valley-esque startups, but any company that creates tools for non-technical end users (either internal or external) typically needs QA.