From the outside, my job as a QA engineer looks purely logical. Analyze the system. Find overlapping functions. Check for common developer mistakes. That’s essentially how we explain testing to others.
But that’s not how I actually experience it. What I do is harder to describe, but I will try. I see the system. I feel the system. And based on what I’m testing, I get this deep sense: “That area. Right there. High probability of a bug.” I can’t prove it logically at first. My gut tightens when I see certain code structures. My intuition lights up before my logic catches up.
That’s a somatic marker. My body remembers patterns from thousands of previous bugs (that’s exactly the reason why you can’t be senior after a month. Nothing gonna replace decades of experience of thousands of bugs, cases and systems). It’s not magic. It’s compressed experience. Emotional memory doing what it does best: pointing me somewhere before I can explain why.
However, emotion doesn’t solve the bug. Logic does. Emotion tells me WHERE to look. Logic does the actual debugging. So what’s really happening is a collaboration. Feeling directs. Logic investigates. And the synthesis of both is what gives the work depth.
And when I can’t repro the bug?! It literally becomes physical. I can’t sleep. My brain won’t stop thinking . I don’t want to eat because my body doesn’t even register hunger as relevant. My entire internal system is out of alignment.
And the moment I solve it! A clean jolt of excitement. Suddenly I can rest. I can eat. It’s like: “All systems aligned. You may now continue living.”
And this is not unique to QA. I experience it in development, in researches etc. I think anyone who does deep focused work knows this feeling. This deep feeling, this desire to solve isn’t logical. The resolution isn’t just intellectual. It’s physical. It’s emotional. It’s the whole system.