James Strawn, who was laid off from Adobe over the summer after 25 years as a senior software quality-assurance engineer.
I can only assume that for the past decade, James has been ignored, or terrible at his job. Every Adobe product has gotten progressively worse to use, forums are filled with bug reports that get ignored release after release, and the increase in system requirements do not reflect improvements in functionality.
Whether because Adobe didn't like what he had to say, or they decided not to listen to him, it's completely unsurprising that he lost his job.
The folks offering $500K/year for AI experts aren't going to take anyone who makes the claim on a resume, they're almost guaranteed to be looking to poach someone at OpenAI or Google. Practically speaking, they're looking to benefit from the experience that those companies paid for...and James doesn't have it.
On the upswing, odds are pretty good that James will have a job in short order, helping to deal with the fallout of 'vibe coders' who don't know how to do real-world testing. He's probably going to run into some combination of age discrimination and salary discrimination (no way he's working for $60K if he has 25 years at Adobe), but once the messes start being too big to ignore, I'm pretty sure he'll be able to become a project manager that helps direct fixes for deployed code that didn't get actual-QA. The need is most definitely there, it'll just take a bit more time to prove to the brass that he's more valuable to the company than the MBAs that are looking at their now-spherical product for more corners to cut.
It is easy enough to be good at your job, while corporate ignores you and lets the product go down hill. Regardless, staying with a company that is heading down hill like Adobe does make those of us who have watched this decline question his sanity, or decision of paycheck over pride in his job.
I really hope you are right that companies will come around to the realization that using AI output is not the same as QA reviewed output. I'm concerned their answer will be that integrating QA is just a Generative Adversarial Network.
