Joining as a QA engineer
As a new grad, it may be tempting to join a company as a QA (Quality Assurance) engineer – it’s often slightly easier to get in as a QA engineer than a standard software engineer, and you’re still an engineer. My recommendation would be to not take this position if you can have a software engineer offer in another company.
If you are hoping to transfer ladder from QA engineer to software engineer, I think it’s a risky move
- Many companies don’t allow such transfer or make it extremely difficult – in some cases it can actually be harder to change ladder than applying right after school
- The process to transfer may change at any time – so even if it seems doable, it may not be the case after a year at your current position. Note that recruiters may tell you stories on how people did it, but they won’t be the one helping with your transfer – they are first and foremost just trying to hire you
Very similar things can be said about moving from UX engineer, sales engineer etc. to software engineer but I think QA is definitively the hardest because of people’s vision that QA engineers are not very technical and just do boring work – even if it’s not true.
To be clear, if writing code and shipping products is what you want, you should take a software engineer position from any company over a QA engineer position – even if it’s at FAANG or some other big tech company.