There are enough debates happening nowadays on whether we are building enough leaders in testing. There can be multiple perspectives and point of views, involved in any debate like this one. Context on which these questions are asked need to be analyzed before trying to answer these questions. Not sure whether I have all the data needed but let me try to provide few of my perspectives here.
The IT industry in India till 2009 was growing at the rate of min 25% in the last 20 years with few exceptions during 2001 and 1992. This unbelievable growth resulted in faster career options and promotions for the people. Many of the people were able to become managers in 7-10 years of leaving their college and all these were necessary to take care of the exploding IT industry growth India has witnessed. However unfortunately it also set the trend and expectations for people. At the same time technical growth was compromised and I don’t think we produced as many test leads compared to test managers in the last two decades.
For a person to become an efficient test lead, longevity in product domain and testing domain are needed and a person aspiring to become a test lead need to focus lot more on technology matters than people management or project management aspects. While many companies in India ensured adequate management growth, they failed to create adequate capacity for people to grow on technical ladder.
There is nothing wrong but it is the time to make course correction and set the direction for future. The growth in IT has stabilized and is in single digits and the supply of capable workforce far exceeds the demand needed for IT industry and new positions created for test managers are becoming less and less in number. India is No:1 in test outsourcing and there is enough talent available in India for test management and the shortage is really for roles like test leads and test architects who have the right combination of testing and product domain skills.
While India was very successful in converting non IT engineers into IT, when demand was more than supply, converting test managers in to test leads/architects are not that easy. One of the reasons is that many of the non-IT to IT conversions in the past happened at entry career level whereas the roles such as lead/architect are at mid-career levels. Depth in testing and product domain can’t be achieved overnight. It is difficult but not impossible. I know of many managers who are also technically capable. Apart from motivating the existing engineers to pursue technical path, companies should also hand-pick few managers and groom them on to technical career path and make technical career attractive and respectful. “Only two hands make the noise” and people also should come forward and put in their best efforts to this transition. There may be some compromises needed from people side when they go from management to technical and vice-versa. Sometimes we may have to pick up a job level just below the current level to be successful with these transitions. The society also needs to change for making this happen. The manager role is perceived to be better than an architect, the same way development was perceived to be better than testing a decade ago. When I say society, it also includes the people from outside of IT Industry and especially the family members of the employees.
Promotions into management are evaporating and a few jobs are getting lost. “Only when there is a job there exist careers”. I feel there are enough opportunities now for technical growth in testing and this may be considered as a viable alternative for people in mid-career level.
Call for action (for companies and people)
- Make both management and technical growth possible in testing
- If you are a manager with deep technology understanding consider switching to technical path
- Equal respect and pride in testing/quality irrespective of the roles (management / Technical) we play
- Adapt to changes. As Darwin said “It is not strongest or smartest species that survive ; only those species that can adapt to changes can”
- If you want long career/ striving to achieve something BIG, you may have to compromise on few things to allot big chunk of time towards your goals
Last but not the least, it is easyto give advises. But the advises here are not out of vacuum as I was part of the transition from management to technical in 2007 and that helped me to see a new world. As said earlier, I had to make few compromises (such as leaving “luxury of manager cabins, assistance of secretary, help of large number of sub-ordinates to work for” …etc), but the results I could achieve after those compromises are definitely worth. “There is no business without investments and these compromises in my opinion are part of those investments”.After these change in approaches, I could then work with wider global technical community, expand my technical knowledge. Itgave me an opportunity to work on cutting edge technology areas such as cloud/mobile. It also helped me to get some patents/publications/awards on the way.