u/deafgamer_

...but when I went to make the counteroffer using the posted range as information, the company recruiter I had been in touch with was genuinely confused - they DID offer the mid range. His reaction was genuine when he pulled up the job posting and the range was 150-250k. The actual internal range was 110k-200k. I don't think this was a bait and switch, but who knows.

Fellas. I am happy with 150k. I work in tech, but I live in a relatively low cost of living area, so this salary goes very far. I had 0 reasons to complain about it. Had the posted range been accurate at 110k-200k I would have already signed the offer today and moved on and finally felt at peace for the first time in 9 months. I just felt that because they offered 150k which was the bare minimum, on principle I just "had" to negotiate.

I'm overthinking and stressing really hard because I won't know until tomorrow the final determination. I hear all of these stories about offers being rescinded and I just got this permanent lump in my throat from all of the stressing I am doing. I'm playing games, watching media, trying to take my mind off things, but ultimately I just have to wait until tomorrow.

The moral of the story: if you're actually OK with some specific salary, just accept the damn thing for your peace of mind. The currently job market is depressingly bad.

I even tried backing out of the comp negotiation in light of the new info (inaccurate posted range and that I was actually offered the mid range) but the recruiter was like no no, I want this for you, I'm gonna see if we can get a little bit more. But what if they had a strong second candidate and they're checking with them instead and if all is good there they'll just rescind my offer. I'm sure I'm way too paranoid about all of this, but the potential that I just threw 9 months of job search down the trash can is such a deeply terrible feeling.

All of the signs point to everything being OK and I'll hear something tomorrow, but I don't know how I'm going to react if it gets rescinded somehow. It's just not worth it to risk anything in today's market.

In 2013, I started out as a backend dev writing frameworks, libraries, CRUD APIs and a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. I moved very quickly into QA automation and quality engineering because it involved writing a lot of frameworks and digestible libraries for other projects to use, and mostly because I found I was very good at breaking software and showing the failure points and gaps in implementations, systems, even people and process. I genuinely enjoy QA so much and I do it as a hobby in video games, finding exploits, reproducing them, and reporting them. In short I was the dev writing tests for other people's work because it wasn't sufficient enough to cover all the bases. Even as QA, I occasionally contributed to backend development needs.

I have 12 yoe doing QA automation and QA people management. I think I'm very good at what I do, and am usually the first QA hire at startups. However, since the AI boom most companies have de-invested from quality, and that's why I got laid off 9 months ago. There is an argument to be made that companies will re-invest back into quality eventually but ... bills need to be paid and I don't like not having an income stream for such a long time. There really aren't that many new QA jobs that get posted.

I'm having a really difficult time applying to anything that's not "QA Manager" or "QA Lead" or "Senior/Staff QA Automation Engineer / SDET" and getting interviews. I could do project management, technical program management, engineering management, and I'd place solidly as a mid-level backend dev - I'm sure I'm really a senior in that respect but I'd like to work up from a mid instead to ensure I get all my bearings.

The problem seems to be a wide variety:

• I supply a resume where all of my titles and impact looks like backend engineering instead of all QA. This feels like a white lie, and they can just go to my Linkedin profile to see that I was actually working in a QA capacity.
• If I overhaul my Linkedin profile, I can no longer apply to QA centric positions, because of the same issue in above point.
• If I do none of the above points and supply a backend engineer resume without deleting the QA footprint, I am 100% sure the resume always makes it's way to the trash bin because non-junior X engineering positions overwhelmingly want you to already be working as a X engineer instead of pivoting.
• I'm a programming polyglot, so I can learn any language in 1-2 weeks, but this isn't sustainable when it comes to applying to any backend job: I don't know what language or tech stack to go all in on. I almost got a C# backend dev job but lost it because I didn't have enough frontend experience (???), even though I learned it in 2 weeks and wasn't told it was really a fullstack position until the final round.
• Even if I wanted to "start over" and try for junior backend positions... there are none, presumably blamed on AI for breaking the junior -> mid pipeline.
• This is a bonus, but I'm deaf, can hear via a cochlear implant and talk just fine, but I have a very heavy deaf accent. Honestly, listening to myself, I would even assume I'm mentally deficient, so I'm not sure how to fix that either. In-person interviews used to help with this but over remote calls it's really bad. I'm thinking about just adding a statement or two addressing my accent at the beginning of calls.

To be honest, my heart still remains in QA, but I feel I have to pivot to get a job now. But I shudder at overhauling literally everything and deleting the QA footprint and history, because the work I did previously should matter, right?

All of the LLMs and other dev forums I frequent (hacker news, SA, etc) repeatedly state that "prior quality engineers are very desirable in backend eng, release eng, data eng, or SRE positions" but I have not seen this to be the case when applying. It appears that I need to already be a backend eng to apply to backend eng positions, release eng to apply to release eng positions, data eng to apply to data eng positions, SRE to apply to SRE positions - what's the solution to this chicken and egg problem?