Do Testers Need Programming Skills ?

Do Testers Need Programming Skills ? A Good Tester Friend View.

Many freshers (especially people with Computer Science background) does not take up the first job as QA engineer and the reason they give is that many organizations give preference to people with development skills even while hiring people for testing positions. This raises the question does the testers need to be coders ? Some blogs report that organization like Microsoft hire the coders for test positions because they want to automate everything and eliminate manual testing. Automation is just one part of testing. But testers who understand programming and CS concepts have better analysis skills for testing. Testers with development skills can find the bugs earlier in development cycle and also find the cause for the bug. This also helps them in finding other places in code where there can be similar errors. I, personally feel that people with programming skills always makes better testers. Does this mean all the testers without programming knowledge be fired ?- of course not. Its always an option to have creative people as testers than bad programmers. An organization cannot have all the testers to have programming knowledge as well, with industry facing shortage of quality programmers. Microsoft seems to have found a way out of this by creating two different job profiles SDET and STE. SDET needs to have good programming skills as they are used for automation and debugging. But even this did'nt seem to have solved the problem completely. Can read more about SDET Vs STE here.