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What I fell in love with wasn't "testing" in the narrow sense. It was the craft around it. The curiosity of understanding systems deeply. The conversations with developers and architects where ideas turned into architecture and architecture turned into working software. The ability to bridge the technical and the business worlds, translating needs, risks, and expectations so teams could build with confidence.
I found satisfaction in the technical side: writing clean, sustainable automation, shaping frameworks, improving pipelines, understanding infrastructure and DevOps processes, and using technology to enable quality at scale.
And as the years went by, something interesting happened: the deeper my expertise grew, the more I noticed an industry pattern, almost a quiet assumption that seniority means stepping away from the craft. That the natural path is to become “the architect” or to move into oversight rather than creation.
Not because anyone told me directly, but because that's often how the industry thinks.
These reflections didn't appear on day one. They surfaced much later, around the time I began moving into roles further away from hands-on delivery and closer to strategy and alignment. And that's when a new question emerged:
Can you grow without moving away from the very work that made you love this field in the first place?
Yet what if growth isn't about leaving the work behind? What if mastery itself - the hands-on, technical, collaborative craft of quality- is a destination worth staying in?
This is a reflection on loving the craft of quality, and navigating a career where expertise sometimes pulls you away from the very work you grew to care about.
