Am I old enough to leave active testing ?

Am I old enough to leave active testing ?
After spending last 10 odd years, testing software for a living, I asked this question to myself:
“Am I old enough to leave active testing ? ” and after a brief moment of indecisive Mr. schizophrenic thought, I told myself that the answer is an emphatic No.

Top 5 reasons to not leave testing
No 1. Testing is still an exciting work more so when you have to go for the details. The much needed involvement is killing and monotonous and gets frustratingly slow and sorts of puts you to the end of your life, only to you a real high in the end, abrubt at time so as to have a grand finale. In this world, one thing you better need all the time is the feeling of being existent. Once you come out from the deep search say isolating a defect, you sort of come out as a victor. The achievement is simply too high to propell you to more such journeys.

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No 2.There are more jobs for Test Engineers then say a Test Manager. Its still considered a core specific skill then being a Manager which folks think as something generic. Probably thats the reason, we are having hard time hiring Test Managers out here at Adobe.

No 3. Coder and Tester are like husband and wife who have to stay together, work together and finally deliver the same project. The only way a group can be successful or rather one of the established ways is to see them as spouses. If you are into active testing, you get an experience w/o actually getting married. I know I know, you are screaming that why the hell do you think that we need the experience, more so when we are so young. Well, its always better to get a good taste what all of you will get into, so it wont hurt to get a feel now.

No 4. You can still have beer with fellow coders on a football game, since you can talk about same old boring non-reproducible bugs and how your managers shouted on you, how a big customer (who also happens to be a X % stake holder) wanted to have a certain window in a Red color and so on.

No 5. Finally, its your concrete chance to make this world a better place to live. For every defect which gets corrected, you have a contribution. Its like actually being able to correct the world and at least find a way to correct this world. Read this point three times.

I hope that over time, I would be able to write more sensible stuff like about testing methodologies.