work-blog/articles/what-is-a-competent-tester.md

Wise words from the early days of the web explosion:


> “*A particularly terrible idea is to offer testing jobs to the programmers who apply for jobs at your company and aren’t good enough to be programmers. Testers don’t have to be programmers, but if you spend long enough acting like a tester is just an incompetent programmer, eventually you’re building a team of incompetent programmers, not a team of competent testers…*” [Joel Spolsky](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/01/26/why-testers/ "https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/01/26/why-testers/")
chore(init): add initial gitignore and blog articles - Add .gitignore to ignore system files like .DS_Store - Add empty CLAUDE.md and GROK.md files - Add initial articles on software testing topics: Agile-Or-Whatever-You-Call-It.md, Testers-As-Explorers.md, The-Various-Uses-Of-Vegetable-Condiments-In-Testing.md, five-essential-lessons.md, perfection-and-testing.md, resources-for-testers.md, the-categories-of-testing.md, the-logic-of-software-testing.md, the-perturbation-theory-of-exploratory-testing.md, what-is-a-competent-tester.md, what-makes-us-better.md - Include assets for articles in assets/ directory 2026-04-07 14:05:45 +00:00				`Wise words from the early days of the web explosion:`



				> “A particularly terrible idea is to offer testing jobs to the programmers who apply for jobs at your company and aren’t good enough to be programmers. Testers don’t have to be programmers, but if you spend long enough acting like a tester is just an incompetent programmer, eventually you’re building a team of incompetent programmers, not a team of competent testers…” [Joel Spolsky](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/01/26/why-testers/ "https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/01/26/why-testers/")