The difference between programmers and testers

I used to have a QA job. Can confirm, this is the soup in my head. That's why I was good at testing. Also, that's not your sister. That's your trans brother, who we also love. See?

Also misses the edge case where sister was born on a leap day

Or maybe in a country that recently switched from the Julian calendar, adding the possibility of >12 months between birthdays as described by calendar.
- https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/calendars has entered the chat.

Real talk: I wish more orgs place a high value on QA. A good QA team is worth it's weight in gold and helps prevent a lot of stupid mistakes.

I wish I had a QA like this.

I design software, another guy builds it, then I test it. I seem to have a really good intuition for ferreting out the edgiest of edge cases and generating bugs. Pretty sure he hates my guts.

Project Managers and software designers are hated for their "designing". The testing is always very welcome.

If you were 4 and now you are 44 then you might be an integer variable. If sister is also a variable, we don't know when she was allocated. She might also be an integer constant in which case she's arguably immortal.

I'm working on a gameboy emulator and the amount of edge cases you have to consider feels just like this lol.

Fails to consider the case in which the 2-year-old sister is now male.

Also that you have died or that she is now of no gender
It definitely does.
- If your parents had another daughter in the meantime (or if your older brother became female), "my sister" would still be a valid reference, to a completely different person.

Love this, 100% accurate. QA people are amazing, protect us from ourselves in so many ways we didn’t even think of.

It's also the system administrator and SRE mindset.
But they still don't think of all common user possibilities. I like this joke:

A software tester walks into a bar.

Runs into a bar.

Crawls into a bar.

Dances into a bar.

Flies into a bar.

Jumps into a bar.

And orders:

a beer.

2 beers.

0 beers.

99999999 beers.

a lizard in a beer glass.

-1 beer.

"qwertyuiop" beers.

Testing complete.

A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.

The bar goes up in flames.
- Bathroom testing was not in scope.
  
  This one's on management.
I wish our test team was like that. Ours would respond with something like “How would I test this?”
- Tester here, I only have to do this if the ticket is unclear / its not clear where impact can be felt by the change. I once had a project with 4 great analysts and basically never had to ask this question there.
- Programmer should have written all the test cases, and I just run the batches, and print out where their cases failed.
Most of the best QA folks I’ve worked with had teenage children.

I imagine dealing with developers is similar.
- I love working with competent QA engineers. It's always a humbling experience.
Hey! My company just fired ours today!
- After all, most delays can directly be traced to the QA department. Wise business decision!
Yes, I second this. QA has caught so many things that did not cross my mind, effectively saving everyone from many painful releases
- I've worked with some insanely talented devs who were amazed at some of the shit I was able to pull and we could have a laugh about it

clearly the answer is 22

Physicist: "assuming a spherical year ..."

In a frictionless vacuum
- Id hate to experience a vaccum with friction.
- All I wanted was a cubical day

well she is half my age and that is a well known time invariant so she is 22

Based on the only comparison we have, the OP is twice the age of their sister. so the sister is now 44/2, or 22. Easy problem.

Based on the only information we have, OPs sister is two. So the sister is 2. Trivial.
ML in action.

I like this one better https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25851770

Didn't even consider leap years. Smh

That's the customer answer, where they give an age in leap years, and everything goes to pot.

So by this definition testers are annoying due to being super pedantic and precise.

Disagree, I think programmers are annoying in exactly the same way.

I'm a Dev with no QA so i just have to be neurotically pedantic so nobody goes to jail
- Good
I think it's more about how testers always run into all the edge cases programmers don't think about
- Can confirm, not even an official tester (just an open beta tester) and have acrued a reputation for having a legendary bug aura that can cause catastrophic and previously unseen edge cases to occur just by opening the software (game)
- Ah this is a perfect example, thank you for providing a sample "programmer response". Lol
I mean, no, the tester didn't say anything wrong here, and all of those (and more) are conditions one must take into account if one were to write a piece of software without errors
- It's never about whether the tester was wrong, its whether we really needed to spend 30 minutes in a 45 minute meeting about project timelines discussing it.

Am I an oddball in that as a developer, that QA answer is the sort of answer I give? It annoys management to no end.

A developer with a QA mindset is never a bad thing in my opinion. It makes sure issues are fixed earlier and saves time (and for management, money)
Nope, a good developer asks exactly the first thing with the birthdays. If you don't have proper data it's impossible to give the correct answer. This is the difference from an experienced developer to a junior.

This all assumes all years are measured by the same orbit with no mixing and matching planets or space habitats.

The standard earth year had not been adopted system wide

Really have to start with a definition of "now"

import birthday;

let myAge1 = 4;
let sisterAge1 = 2;
let myAge2 = 44;

let sisterAge2 = birthday.deriveAge(myAge1, sisterAge1, myAge2);

print(sisterAge2);

Any bugs should be reported upstream. Please open a tracking issue to sync changes with eventual upstream fixes.

The API has the wrong abstraction and the type definitions fail to capture necessary information (such as in which year you were of the given age) and thus conversions can not be guaranteed to be correct

[Test]
public void Sister_IsAstronaut() 
{

Managers when a tester does this in a planning meeting, asking for more time to write better teats: 😠

Managers when a staff level engineer does this in a post-fuckup root cause analysis meeting telling everyone what went wrong: 🤤

Managers when the tester points out it wouldn't have happened if tests for it had gotten written:

Probably? Nah mate, your box of stuff, has already been chucked out of the window... You are next

This may be why I hated math.

That's a good tester.
In my experience coders usually make absolutely terrible testers, testing only for the most inane case, or just positive cases (ie, it does the nominal case without bursting into fire).

Pentester:

42, -7, Yellow, false, null, {{7*'7'}}

Also, we first have to define more precisely what 'being 2' means. E.g., if we just count birthdays and one of them is born on Feb 29th in a leap year, that person 'ages' with 1/4 of the speed.

Now that’s thinking like a lawyer!

The funny thing is, when I talk to lawyers (of which I am not one) it's nothing like this, because any human court will understand the intention of the question is arithmetical. It will create legal fictions to paper over affairs, rule the law inapplicable if the sister is dead, and go for lunch.

It seems law is like 90% precisely defined and 10% whatever the courts decide that day. That turns out out to be stable while still fairly immune to edge cases, so it's stuck for centuries.

!lemmySilver