Why are Selenium automation jobs decreasing?

from indeed.com

The market demand for test automation is higher than ever but the number of automation jobs is lower.


How can this be?



One reason is the "test automation" name.

Test automation is not a good name for this type of work.

Automated checking or tool-assisted testing (James Bach) are describing better what actually happens.

Automation does not automate or replace creative testing but just checks that simple and clear test cases work.



Because test precedes automation in the name, companies and testers thought that test automation is a part of testing and it should be done by testers.

Testers thought that test automation is the silver bullet for their careers and went ahead with the "learning phase".

After learning the bare minimum of Selenium and a programming language in less than a year, many claimed that they are automation engineers instead of manual testers.

And some companies, especially the ones without rigorous interviewing processes, hired the manual-testers-converted-overnight-to-automation-engineers.

These "engineers" started with enthusiasm to build automation projects and wrote code, lots of code.

Which in most cases was just a bunch of crap.



I have seen such projects built by automation "experts" who

1. do not understand inheritance and composition
2. have no clue how to use interfaces
3. don’t know what page factory, loadable component or yes, maven are
4. use maps instead of objects
5. create test classes with thousands of lines of code and hundreds of methods
6. create page classes with click/type/getText methods for each page element (again with thousands of lines of code)
7. use static methods and variables heavily
8. use utility classes a lots

These are testers that are experts at writing-VB-code-in-Java.

The only thing that matters for them is if the code works now.

It is less important that the code is inefficient, not object oriented, difficult to read and maintain.

It is also less important that the code fails randomly when executed in Jenkins.

If the tests fail, we just rerun them until they pass.

After a while, companies start realizing that things are not going well at all, especially when they have a few thousands of tests which fail with a 25-30% rate.

And, at this moment, they switch direction and hire either developers or testers who became developers.

In most cases, a good developer can do the work of 3-4 VB-in-JAVA automation experts.



So, see, it is completely possible that the business demand is higher but the number of jobs lower.

The market matures and filters out people who are not suitable or ready for automation work.

Pradeep Soundararajan (from Moolya) said somewhere on Quora that

Not all manual testers will disappear, only the unprofessional ones.

My opinion is that this is happening for test automation as well:

The professional automation engineers will stay, the other ones will fade away.

Contrary to what you hear from a lot of people, test automation is not easy and it is not for anyone.

To do it well, you have to learn a new job and become a developer.

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