three years of manual QA, and the thing that actually transferred to dev wasn't code

Three years of manual QA and I figured I'd be starting from zero when I moved to dev. Wrong, mostly. Writing test cases taught me to think in edge cases before I ever wrote a line of code — first PR review, my lead just said "you already write like someone who's been burned before," and that stuck with me. What didn't transfer: any real sense of how long things take to build. I still lowball estimates constantly. If you're QA and thinking about switching, the bug-hunting instinct is worth more than any bootcamp module on syntax.