This vid is almost obligatory when talking about qa testing... https://youtu.be/baY3SaIhfl0
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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I test and do QA on electrical industrial systems. The one older engineer told me sometimes he will roll a wrench across a keyboard to see how the system / code will react. The idea being someone in a steel mill might trip and land on the keyboard.
Breaking things is the best way to test them
100% an AI would find this. Heck, a simple genetic algorithm would eventually try it. From the QA's description, it would just maximize RAM usage. Researchers regularly see the AI break their simulation to maximize some utility function. The hard part is keeping it from doing that.
I would love to see an AI do my job. I am professionally stupid in a way that a machine could not even dream of.
This might be the best description of a good game QA that I've ever read
Given most AI are trained on datasets mined from the deepest public cesspits of the internet... that is a bet I'd be wary of making.
Nah. Stupid is "button mashing" with no intent. Professionally stupid is button mashing cover and equipping a weapon while switching to third person thereby storing your coordinates so that when you re-enter first person it moves you to those stored coordinates. If you lock your coordinates on an inside map then re-enter first person outside it moves you to the center of the map. That's how speed runners beat the game on 40 minutes.
I think I remember seeing a game where if you shot with a sniper rifle, and switched to knife right after, you'd "become the bullet" and get projected to stab the distant enemy (or something similar, I don't recall exactly what/how). That's the kind of bugs that are fcking hilarious.
I was a QA tester for a mobile game company back when feature phones had games. Some of the shit was silly like jumping against the left wall 300 times would crash the game, or rapidly putting the phone into and out of a faraday cage would crash the game.
Any time we crashed the phone things got spicy, and we had special instructions to follow if we found a way to disrupt the micro cell in the office.
I also did that (and some development) and hated that basically every phone behaved differently, even sibling models from the same manufacturer. J2ME was a nice idea but every phone had different glitches. The emulators were shit. So we had almost all models of all major brands there and had to test everything on all of them.
That's a sickass job
For every fun thing you get to test there are a dozen miserable little things that you get spend entire days plodding through. And they pay you absolute dick to do it.
'You are in charge of testing high punches vs every female character while wearing each and every helmet cosmetic. When you are done move on to the same with low punches.
Why yes, we are working this weekend.'
Sorry, which job are we talking about again?
I think porn star. He said he gets paid as "Absolute Dick". Which is a porn name if I ever heard one.
Seems fun until you find yourself playing the same 2 levels of "Barbie Horse Adventures" 40 hours a week (60+ during crunch) for 8 months.
At the tester level it's interesting, but past a year or two of experience it becomes more system integration and risk focused.
Source: twenty years in the industry