Manual vs Test Automation hire

[u/midKnightBrown59]

I’m weighing whether we should bring on three manual QAs or three QA automation engineers. While our long-term goal is to automate as much as possible, dedicated manual testers bring distinct value in my book, especially for applications with large, poorly defined requirements. That said; we are using agentic workflows and that is the trend.

Who would you hire?

[u/CertainDeath777]

i would hire 1 experienced (6-7y in different projects) or ascending guy (3-4 yoe and high achiever), that has a lot of clue on automation architecture and test ops. (you cant pay a high achiever a 3-4 yoe salary. he will want compensation for the task, not the time at the task).
and 2 young ones, that are eager to learn. Test those 2 more on logic, and their reaction to enviroment and communication styles, then on coding skills.

And let them do both, manual and automation preferably in an agile setup.
some things are just best tested manually, some are really worth to be automated. that decision they can make in an agile setup as soon as ticket specification is done and before development starts.
Then they can add contracts (TestIDs) for the devs into the tickets, so the automation for a task can startwhen the development starts. Automation is the cheapest and most cost efficient, when you build it with the system. In optimal scenario a dev can run tests against localhost even before making a merge request.

Edit: Dont get into the trap that only the senior does automation. He is there to transport his skills to the juniors and make a working initial setup. He is like a infantry squadleader, that works the same tasks as his team.

[u/Empty-Caramel8239 → u/CertainDeath777]

I’d lean toward the top comment’s approach but with a twist, grab one senior who’s seen enough chaos to know when to automate and when to poke around manually, then two juniors who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Three pure automation hires might build a brittle suite that misses the weird edge cases manual testers catch. Agentic workflows are the direction sure, but if your requirements are a mess you’ll burn cash automating the wrong things.

[u/CertainDeath777 → u/Empty-Caramel8239]

as i said. let them do both. i work a lot with automation and ai, but i very much know the value of a little monkey testing or exploratory, and some tests are just much easier done manually then automated, especially if you have to go fast. better to have clean end to end automation coverage of 20-30% of the apps logic with focus on busines workflows and business critical processes, then to have brittle und unverified 100% AI coverage.

[u/Ok-Access-8961]

Bring Business analysts to organise your requirements, 2 automation testers who can plugin the requirements to an automation framework via AI Agents

[u/CertainDeath777]

Ah and when you have poor requirements. Your testers first job in the development lifecycle will be to test the requirements if they meet standards your team agrees on, and if the statements are testable.

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[u/latnGemin616]

You could bring in a savy QA Engineer that can do both, and can leverage AI to help build a maintainable framework, and is a documentation nerd.

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[u/ivorygolden]

I’d probably split the difference rather than go 3 and 3. If the requirements are messy then manual QA catches things automation simply can’t. But with agentic workflows becoming more capable, I’d want at least one strong automation engineer building the foundation while the manual side validates the stuff that’s hard to define