From Automating to Automating

After graduating from college in 2022, I was happy with where life was heading. I had secured a good placement and enjoyed four months of working from home without worrying about exams or assignments.

I began my career as a QA engineer, learning about the product during my initial phase. But soon, I realized that most of my work was repetitive and not very exciting. As someone once said,

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“Boring work lets you think.”

So, I started thinking—and reaching out to leads, developers, and other teammates to explore more. From these conversations, I discovered that even they weren’t doing anything particularly challenging. That wasn’t what I had expected at all. Someone suggested I try automation, nah that's not I wanted what's exciting there, I asked them again for development works.

Confusion

After six long months of effort, I finally got a development task. It was quite simple, and I completed it within a day. I hoped this would earn me some recognition and more challenging work. While I did receive a few “good job” compliments, nothing really changed—I was soon back to my regular QA tasks. I reached out again and got a slightly more complex assignment, but it still wasn’t what I had hoped for. Once again, the advice remained the same: “Automate QA work.” I became curious—why was everyone so focused on automation? What made it such a big deal? We were automating some SaaS-related tasks, but they didn’t seem challenging or exciting. Still, I continued, since I was getting paid anyway.

Fast forward to 2024. One day, my manager asked me, “What’s your goal?”—a question I had been waiting to answer for a long time. I told him I wanted to do more coding, something I’d learned for six years. He connected me with the DevOps team, and that’s when things started to get interesting. Finally, something challenging! Regi our lead, from the DevOps team, gave us full freedom to automate anything we wanted. It felt fresh and exciting at first, but soon I started asking myself again—why was everyone so obsessed with automation? What was its real value? A few days later, I got an idea to create a UI automation suite, something completely new for our team at that time. Developing it from scratch was fun, creative, and finally felt rewarding. We've automated more than 150+ testcases in 20+ features.

QA Automation

Now, in 2025, just before writing this blog, I was discussing with a friend the idea of automating rubber milk cultivation to make farmers’ work easier (As AI would replace developers later I would replace them as well hehe). And that’s when it hit me—somewhere along the way, I had started thinking like everyone else: What can we automate next?