My community offers a 40 hour course for beginners (me) in Software Testing.

Would this be enough to get an entry level QA job?

I believe you can also take a Software Testing course online. Not sure which one is more advantageous??

What's the job market like atm for s/w testers?

I reside in the Bay Area. Former online grinder looking for a career change. Strongly considering a tech career, and am currently looking at anything/everything in tech.

From what I hear, QA is a good way to ensure you never get hired in software dev

Look also at the requirements for job openings to get an idea what is required.

Many countries have entry level software certification exam as well such as http://www.istqb.org/ ISTQB foundation. At least in Europe and seems to be rather easy. Don't know if they value certs where you live.

At least in UK and Ireland they seem to require decent amount of experience. Year or so min. I suppose you are looking into manual testing to start with?

Other aspects QA I would imagine requires even more experience.
I did learn some system testing at my previous work by going to IT folks and pretty much asking if they need people to do UAT testing and such.

This is horribly false!

+10000000000000000000000000000

I've been in QA (as an SDET) for 15 years and have turned down development jobs because I prefer the freedom of the QA org.

I haven't seen a software testing class yet that has seemed worth the cost. If you're completely new to computers, then maybe it is worth the time just to learn some jargon, but to be honest with you, when I'm going through a resume looking for a manual tester, I am looking at where you've worked, if you have any side projects that seem relevant for what I need you to do, and at least a general breadth of technical experience (you can use linux and windows and mac or you've tried scripting a site using selenium).

Three other things:

1. what i look for may be more specific than others simply because I know exactly what I want out of my QA team. From looking at resumes, the bay area is way more lenient on the experience for a starter QA person.

2. the bay area has gaggles of qa openings, just apply to everyone and eventually you'll get an interview where you can talk about testing and how you'll test product X.

3. check out https://www.utest.com/ It might be the best place for you to start because they are a community test organization and you can slowly learn how to test and build up to testing more complex products. Even better, you can do it as a side job so you're not putting pressure on yourself to figure it all out at once.

Good luck!

Strong post. Tyvm!

Is it going to be a problem that I have essentially no comp sci experience? I was briefly a soft eng (for 7 months) over 10 years ago. That job involved more testing than actual development. I am familiar with selenium, but have never used it. The same can be said for linux, unfortunately.

How can I stand out on my resume when I apply? I have a highly logical mind and can find holes in s/w programs quite easily, but as far as employers are concerned I'm just a guy that's played cards for 10 years with no comp sci degrees, and no real world experience (discounting that brief job from many years ago). From their POV I'm not sure why they would interview me. In your opinion what's the best game plan given all that?

Oh and what job boards (or other methods, such as head hunters, for example) would you recommend in order to find these jobs? Craigslist doesn't seem to be particularly fruitful..

Many thanks in advance.

To me, this is a boring and uninspired career path. Definitely don't rush your decision--make sure it's something you really want to do, rather than something that can just get you a quick job.

Duly noted. A fair point. I "think" I would enjoy testing, but that's just a guess. In my extremely brief time as a sw eng I really liked trying to find faults in my algorithms--trying to think of any and all scenarios possible. It's a way of thinking in which I am fairly proficient. Perhaps QA is nothing like that, or perhaps doing that for 8 hrs a day would be dull??

One of the biggest drawbacks to playing poker for a living (for me) was the fact that it wasn't something I enjoyed doing 30-40 hours a week. Some things are more fun for a couple hours but not so much for many hours.

Based on what I've seen so far, QA is nothing like that.

+1. I'm just breaking into software development but from my understanding you'd probably start out doing very basic stuff like input/output validation and probably wouldn't be providing feedback on the design of the software.

I have seen QA in a few different orgs. As to how interesting the work is, it depends. With all of the effort towards automated testing in so many places now, I think it probably will be an area that you will find interesting. When I worked at Intel, we had to certify the device drivers with Microsoft's WHQL test software. I am going to guess that writing the test software was pretty interesting. Of course the QA teams at Intel had to set up the test environments, record the data, etc. but a lot of that stuff could have been automated, probably is now. My point is that QA roles are not that static and in fact I think the static/stratified role type concept is changing where software developers do product code and are also involved in QA. I do mostly product work but there are QA responsibilities on the projects that I volunteer for. A lot of developers doing product code don't want to he involved in QA work. I look at it as another way to learn more about the products, learn more about QA basically, and become more valuable to management. I also enjoy the work.

I had a friend who worked in QA. Basically his job consisted of manually interacting with a consumer facing website and trying to break it, running tools against the site to test for issues and occasionally writing his own glue code to automate some of his own job.

All of the tooling he used was taught to him on the job. I forgot the names of the tools but I remember them being general open tools, they weren't written internally.