My advice for new testers

Today, I like to write a bout some advice that I can provide for new testers.

For a brand new testers, who just graduated from college or stared his/her career as a tester, what kind of advice will help him/her be successful in this field?

I can think of three things to start with.

1. Be a thinker. 
This is pretty obvious advice, but it is really important requirement to be a successful test engineer. If a tester does not think and do what was told, he/she is useless in my mind. Can a tester question requirements and specs? Can a tester question application architecture and development design? Can a tester seek to improve the testing process? Can a tester think like a customers/users? Can a tester think about business impact of application failures? Can a tester suggest a better approach in solving problems to devs and PMs?

2. Credibility 
In my opinion, the credibility is everything for  a tester. This is something we, testers, earns from people(dev, PM, testers, managers, and etc) around us in the team. This can be pretty subjective at the beginning, but as the team delivers projects by projects, people notice testers' credibility. I believe testers' credibility not only affects the success of the project but also the career path of the tester. If a tester crying about every single bug or issue he/she found, project team start not to listen to him/her seriously. We need to make sure to provide reasoning for the bugs and issues. Is that a ship stopper? Why and how this issue impact the operation of the application and the business should be clearly prepared and addressed when a tester write a bug or telling the team about the issue. A credible tester finishes testing on time. People have confidence in delivering a good project, when a credible tester is in the project team.

3. Being as Technical as dev
This maybe applicable to SDETs (Software Development Engineer in Test). I believe the technical skill for SDE I level and SDET1 level should be the same. Sr SDE and Sr SDET should have the same technical skills. The only difference between SDE and SDET is the area they're focusing on. SDE focuses on application development, in which design, architecture, optimization of the code, and performance are important. SDET focuses on  application testing, in which test framework design, maintainability of the code, robustness and reliability are important. Knowledge in programming language, coding skills, designing the applications, unit testing, executing DB queries should not be a problem for testers.