Me, Ranting About Thinking
Joey McAllister (favorite hashtag: #expectpants) recently talked with me (electronically) about critical thinking and learning.
The interview is here in case you’re curious.
Joey McAllister (favorite hashtag: #expectpants) recently talked with me (electronically) about critical thinking and learning.
The interview is here in case you’re curious.
What a difference a decade makes. Amazon tells me that Dec. 10, 2008, is the release day of How We Test Software at Microsoft. Before I reflect on the content, take a look at this photo from the back cover: Or this one from a few months later at Barnes & Noble: I’ve aged (at…
I’m back for another FfF earlier than I expected. Hope you find something interesting in these links. I enjoyed this article about the perils of SAfE. I found a few articles this week on learning from incidents – the first is on retrospectives at Inded The second is a few years old (but new to…
In early January, I’ll hit my 19 year anniversary of working at Microsoft (I’ve worked for Microsoft 18.5 years, and as a vendor at Microsoft for the first 5 months or so). There’s been a lot of change over the years, but perhaps never as much as is going on right now. We’re getting a…
I have somewhat of a non-traditional test role at Microsoft. I’m a tester (that’s what my business card says), but I don’t own any specific components or features. I test, but mostly where I want to discover something for myself, experiment with an idea, or when I’m coaching others. The bulk of my time, in…
Today has been an interesting day in American politics. Not sure what happens next, but I hope it gets better. Here are a few things I found this week that I thought were interesting. This post on PM & EM: Rules of Engagement echoes something I’ve noticed over the past several years – there’s a…
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Nice interview. Thinking is key, but too often forgotten about. It’s the core of my job descriptions, example below for the last lead role I had opened:
We are looking for an experienced SDET Lead to help us tackle big challenges around getting our Systems and Automation to scale to millions and millions of phones across a vast partner ecosystem around the globe.
Job responsibilities will include lots of thinking. You will also be responsible for improving the existing test efforts on the team, but the thinking part definitely comes first. To be successful in this role, you should be pragmatic, results driven, and of course technically sharp. College degree NOT required. Specific programming skills NOT being prescribed as we expect you’ll apply the best solution as needed. We DO require you to be smart and have the innate ability to get tough testing challenges solved.
Customers are the number one reason we exist, and ensuring they have magical experiences with their phones is our top priority. Their excitement helps drive our own passion to create compelling experiences. A successful candidate will need the strong built-in desire to deliver magic.
Daryl – I LOVE this job description. I would love to see more people advertising for roles like this.
Thanks for reading and posting.
Nice interview. In the interview, you mention what do philosophy majors do? They hopefully fall into software testing like I did. I never thought of software testing in college, but my degree in communications rhetoric and minor in philosophy have been a perfect fit in this field and I couldn’t be happier with the constant challenge it presents. I wish there was more out there showing students what a software testing career offers.
That’s awesome – I knew there had to be a philosophy major in testing somewhere. Thanks for chiming in.