The day before class I happened to see a job posting. It was about Playwright, but it was not about test automation. Playwright is the tool this class was starting that morning, a program that opens web pages, clicks the buttons and types into the forms by itself, the way a person would, and testing is what it is usually used for. I looked into what the company was going to use it for. It was a cybersecurity company using Playwright for agentic penetration testing: a program that clicks through your own website on its own, trying to break in before somebody else does. I had been using the tool for almost every kind of agentic automation and I had never thought of that as a thing. It was a thing.
The next morning I told the class about the job listing. There were no years of experience in it. It named the tools, it named large language models, the AI brains an agent runs on, it named agentic frameworks, and that was all it asked for. I told them what I saw in it: learn Playwright, sit down with this for a week or two, and I think there's nothing in that job description that you guys cannot do.
Then I asked them how much it paid.
$80,000 a year, one student said. I said okay, $80,000, what else, anyone else. Nothing. A room full of people, and nobody would say a number out loud.
So I told them. Come on, guys. Throwing numbers are free. You don't lose anything.
$100,000, she said. Go up a little bit, I said. $120,000. Go up. $150,000. No. Go up. It can't be more than $200,000, she said, and she stopped there.
She stopped at $200,000 a year. How far off was she?
$9,000. $209,000 a year, for a tool they were starting that morning. She was nearly right the moment she stopped being afraid of the number, and the first guess in the room was less than half of it. Not for the tools; the tools were two weeks of sitting down. For a penetration test that somebody is already willing to pay for, at somebody else's price. The tool we use to pretend to be a user in testing had been hired to be the user for real, and that is the number that woke the room.