I just read Thinking Tester's post where he quotes Dr. Cem Kaner from the Yahoo "software-testing" group as he discusses his view of software testing as a career.
An excerpt:
We are professional investigators. Rather than building things, we find ways to answer difficult questions about the quality of the products or services we test. Our job--if we choose to do it well--requires us to constantly learn new things, about the product, its market, its implementation, its risks, its usability, etc. To learn these, we are constantly developing new skills and new cognitive structures in a diversity of fields. It also requires us to communicate well to a diverse group of people. We ALSO get to build things (test tools), but very often, we build to our own designs, which can be more satisfying than building an application that does something we'll never personally do (or want to do).
The whole post is well worth reading.
Me? Well, I just started my JOB as a tester 8 months ago and for almost 2 years before that I worked on small projects where I did a lot of design and development along with bits and pieces of project management, testing, usability, sustained engineering and several other things. Personally, I like the way Dr. Kaner describes "software development as a bundle of coordinated tasks, including programming, design, testing, usability evaluation, modeling, documentation, development of associated training, project management, etc." I definitely consider my CAREER to be in software development [using Dr. Kaner's description] while my current JOB is testing.
~tod