Part-time test automation is bullshit

You either do it (full time) or do not.

There are no half measures.

I am talking about part time job duties and not part time jobs.

Professional developers are never asked to do part time programming (and customer support for the rest of the time). No developer would agree to this as writing professional code is his motivation. He cannot have professional skills only using them from time to time. For proper development, his skills must be sharp, well tuned, well practiced and up-to-date.

Professional skills can only go UP or DOWN. There is no other option.

Use them a lot and they improve, dont use them or use them sometimes and they get worse.

If you use them less, you start forgetting a little bit here, a little bit there, then whatever you were able to do in 1 hour, now you need a day, in one word you get worse day by day.

But if professional developers would not agree to part time coding, junior developers are ok with it. And this is fine if it is just a training phase and a prelude to full-time development. Anything else is just a waste of time.

Professional programming cannot be part-time for the same reason professional writing, violin playing, being a chef cannot be part time jobs.

You can do them part time and be an amateur, maybe a good one but not a professional.

Test automation is programming as well.

There are companies that train their testers in test automation with a hope that they automate some of their manual tests. After the training is over, the tester gets to do test automation once in a while, when they have no other manual testing tasks. Maybe once per week or a few hours here and there.

You may say that this is not too bad and it is much more than nothing. It is bad.

The testers never have time for automation since there is always something else to do.

Also, it is not their job to do automation.

Doing automation once in a while rarely gets them to work on solutions to complicated situations that can trigger more learning and more programming skills improvement.

So they do some coding initially, then a bit less (those releases take precedence), then less and less (have so many test cases to create and execute) until not at all. The less they do it, the less they remember and the more difficult to write any code.

Part-time test automation is not going to make you an automation engineer.

If thats what you want, you need to figure out a way out of testing and dedicate yourself to programming.

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