I can tell you this is 110% true in my case. I graduated and landed a very shitty testing job at a big consulting firm. I worked hard like a mule( more like a donkey ) for 11 months.
Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job.
I resigned the next month.
Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applying again but this time in development roles( instead of QA ).
Lo and behold, did not get a single response from even a small scale startup. Removed my QA experience and just put my Node,Express projects at the top.
Guess what, finally recruiters started to call me.
I realised how I fucked up big time by jumping on the first job offer that I got and my experience for almost an year was just a shit stain on my resume, which completely stalled my career if I hadn't removed it.
That same experience will be a boon later. You can show your progression from QA > Dev > Whatever you want. It's no longer an anchor weighing you down, it's a Rocky Balboa underdog story.
Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.
A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:
> The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.
Honestly, I have always felt really bad about hiring someone into a QA role. It is almost always a trap and I try to discourage people from going down that path for exactly the reasons you describe.
I am glad you've gotten past it. Excellent. Good luck to you.
I've been involved in screening candidates where we basically did just put aside applications from people whose commercial experience was not exactly what the JD was asking for, and indeed some were those with a background in testing/QA when we specifically needed a developer. But that's because we had a ton of resumes sent through by recruiters where it seemed like they'd done very little to ensure they were sending us relevant candidates.
To be fair we would have put your resume aside if you'd removed your QA experience too if you didn't also have significant commercial experience as a developer.
But in general if I was responsible for the final call on a junior hire I'd definitely prefer someone with industry experience even in a different role over someone with none at all.
Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job. I resigned the next month.
Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applying again but this time in development roles( instead of QA ).
Lo and behold, did not get a single response from even a small scale startup. Removed my QA experience and just put my Node,Express projects at the top. Guess what, finally recruiters started to call me.
I realised how I fucked up big time by jumping on the first job offer that I got and my experience for almost an year was just a shit stain on my resume, which completely stalled my career if I hadn't removed it.