Reviving a 19 Year Old Test to See If an Employer Is Worth Working For

It&#x27;s absolutely shocking how many companies don&#x27;t understand how important these points on the Joel Test are. I forget who made an amended version of this list to change &quot;best tools money can buy&quot; to &quot;giving developers wide allowance in buying tools and hardware which make their job easier. Sometimes this is a 3rd or 4th monitor; sometimes it&#x27;s a $1500 chair that is so comfortable and makes back pain disappear so that one can concentrate on a feature&#x2F;bug fix for hours without needing to get up and stretch (yes, a personal thing for me), or non-standard-issue software&#x2F;tooling like GitKracken or RedGate or BeyondCompare or Sublime Text....<p>Managers complain about spending so much money that&#x27;s not in the budget but how much does turnover cost you in terms of lost productivity and recruiting fees?<p>(And speaking of recruiting fees: why are companies willing to pay $20k or more to recruiters but only a $500 for a referral from current employees? Recruiters in the midwest pay $1000 or more for referrals who get hired -- companies are telling their employees that it&#x27;s in their interest to tell their qualified friend&#x2F;lead to contact the recruiter instead of doing an internal referral.)

I would like to hear some comments about: &quot;I like having dedicated testers on my team but many places don’t anymore and if you have a good process in place for automated testing you can do just fine.&quot;<p>In the 1990s, I recall (perhaps wrongly) one of the Microsoft books talking about one tester for every two developers.<p>At the tail end of the 1990s, I worked as a developer in a group with a QA team, and they caught bugs, including ones where it took me a while to even see there was a bug. Which means that I couldn&#x27;t have written the tests for them.<p>Nowadays, I do consulting&#x2F;contract programming, and my clients always do manual testing of what I shipped them, before signing off on the payment. That&#x27;s in addition to the unit tests I write. And they find bugs.<p>So, what does it mean &quot;if you have a good process in place for automated testing you can do just fine&quot;? Does it mean that it&#x27;s okay to let your users be your QA group, since there&#x27;s a process for handling that?<p>Or is it something else I don&#x27;t know about, given that I&#x27;m a one-person developer?