Most test automation demos are too clean.
The demo app is stable. The login flow is simple. The selectors are obvious. The data is predictable. CI is not under pressure. Nobody is trying to debug a flaky checkout test five minutes before a release.
Real test automation work is different.
The product changes. The frontend refactors. A locator breaks. A test passes in preview but fails after merge. An AI-generated Playwright test looks good but asserts the wrong thing. A CI job keeps failing only under parallel execution. Someone adds a feature flag. Someone else updates a React component. The browser suite starts taking too long, so people add retries and hope for the best.
That is the world SDETs actually live in.
