Health insurance is high deductible, high premium
Your sick days can only be used as sick days and are forfeited at the end of the year
Pay is well below market value, with few opportunities for growth
Everyone is basically in competition with each other for who gets a semi-decent raise
Promotions seem to favor people who work a lot of overtime, moving them into a title that does not pay for overtime
Lack of transparency in job descriptions, basically tricking software developers into testing
Development team and product owners do not respect QA
Some people can really be dismissive whether it's because you're in QA, a woman, or you just call them out on their own bs
Teams either have barely any work at all or completely unrealistic deadlines
Meetings, meetings, meetings
QA gets blamed for everything that goes wrong
Can get tricked into taking on a "stretch assignment", which is basically just higher level work that isn't relevant to your current skillset with no title change nor additional pay under the hope that it will work in your favor come year end reviews, even though you most likely would already get a raise/promotion anyway if you were in consideration for a stretch assignment at all
People will fewer qualifications and less experience will be making more money than you
Compensation is only reassessed once (rarely twice) a year and you're not guaranteed anything to offset inflation or cost of living
Can be stuck with an entry level title and salary for years
Management frequently makes false promises
Managers who actually do work towards moving testers into development, which is what they though they would be doing from the beginning, will only move them internally within the quality engineering department
Everything is drowning in processes
They keep flirting with the idea of moving back into the office, only to backtrack whenever a massive amount of people resign in response, just to repeat the cycle again
Management will try to manipulate you into doing what they want by giving you the false hope of it working in your favor during the performance reviews (such as having cameras on during meetings and going in person into the office)
Promotions and raises go towards whomever upper management knows and likes better and are not actually merit or skill based
You're more likely to make more money as a new hire than to get a noticeable raise as a current employee. It's not uncommon to be making less money than the people you're managing
Will stagnate your career as a software developer, as you'll be spending months or years doing only testing, possibly doing solely manual testing depending on the team
Understaffed teams means existing staff has to take on extra work for no additional pay
Management makes compensation recommendations before you even submit your self-assessment for the performance review
