I've actually walked through some videogame testing departments, and many companies seem to hire people straight out of high school for peanuts. Because they pay peanuts, they get the kids who are really into games but may not have good communication skills. To be a good tester in any type of business, you need to be super-patient (because you have to do things over and over again), have a good memory or note-taking skills (to remember exactly what you did when you ran into a bug), and have excellent communication skills (to report to someone else who can fix the problem what exactly the problem was). I've seen bug reports for things (not games), that literally read: "It doesn't work." What is "it"? And how doesn't it work? It's enough to make a person insane. Game companies have to invest the money and time to make a good testing department, and hire people and make sure to train them. Near the end of the project, you can save so much time by having a great testing staff. Otherwise, you lose a lot of time running around and having to double-check and ask questions over and over again. I don't hold the kids responsible; I hold the companies responsible for not hiring better and not training better.

What frustrates me is, when people play a buggy, sloppy game, they always think "how did the testers miss this?!"

While that is sometimes the case (there are some crappy testers in the world), it's just as often the case that testers DID find the problem, DID report it, and for various reasons the developers/publishers decided not to fix the bug.

Defintiely a good point. I know that at the end of a project, if there are 25 P1 (priority 1, or the highest priority) bugs and 100 P5 bugs, then we aren't spending 20% of our time on the P1s and 80% of our time on the P5s; we spend 95% of our time on the P1s & P2s and spend the rest of the time trying to get to any P3s, P4s, and P5s that we can humanly get to. I've been less than happy with several shipped projects where I knew where all the unfinished corners were.

Agreed that most of the time, the bugs are found, they're just not closed due to time/budget constraints. That said, I think one of the things that's problematic for me is that test *departments* in many companies I've worked at have a very "frat house" sort of feel. Toys everywhere, posters of women up in cube walls, and a social atmosphere that's defined by a bunch of adolescent boys.

It's almost culturally an unpleasant place for anyone who doesn't fit rigidly into those cultural archetypes, and since so much of the industry comes from a QA background, it's no wonder that the industry reflects that "boys' club" mentality so strongly.