Rafi has recently turned 18 and started freelancing as a Tester Work tester. He is a Romanian high-school student and he shares his thoughts on why the field of testing represents a great opportunity for all teens nowadays.
A new generation of teenagers, formed in a totally different context from their parents and grandparents, reached the age of maturity after the year 2020. They are the young people raised in the company of mobile phones, gadgets of all kinds and a virtual life that rivals with the palpable reality in which their ancestors lived.
Raised in a period of relative peace, without any major worries and problems, this new generation is much more open to accepting challenges that the old generation could have imagined. One of these challenges is working from home, which no longer requires travel to a different location, the whole job being carried out in the comfort of their home. One such job could be testing.
To begin with, let’s define the notion of “tester” and “testing”: The tester is a person who ensures the integrity, quality, efficiency and proper functioning of the code written by the programmer. In short, a software tester deals with checking a program or a part of a program, with the aim of identifying possible runtime deficiencies.
“Testing” is the process of exercising the IT system to assess ts quality, detect errors, verify that it meets all requirements, explore and understand the status of the benefits and risks associated with its launch.
Some advantages of this job for teenagers are: low costs (without, for example, the costs related to transportation to a specific location), the flexible schedule, which allows the continuation of studies, but especially the activity carried out in the virtual environment, which they are already used to childhood.
Among the disadvantages, we can mention the fact that most young people have a distorted perception of how to earn money, expecting to get rich overnight, or this does not apply to those who choose to work in testing. Another disadvantage refers to aspects related to health, since sedentary activity in front of a device will never have the same effects on health as an activity in the middle of nature would imply. The only compromise could be working in the virtual environment, but in a natural environment.
In my opinion, teenagers who are still in school or fresh out of the education system, should consider testing as a (side) job. It is the perfect opportunity for an inexperienced young person to develop new skills and earn some money by having the flexibility of a self made working schedule.
