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.
Every year, Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence group holds an internal conference – five days of talks, panels, booths and receptions (in other words, it’s just like any other conference, except only Microsoftees are invited). This is the first year since 2004 where I’ve been at the conference and not in the EE group. You’d think that…
Once again, I’m a day late, but who am I kidding – you read these on Monday anyway. This is a great article on why we’re so bad at software engineering As a self-proclaimed change agent, this article on change programs was interesting Ministry of Test is doing some podcast interviews with upcoming speakers. This…
We’re already a third of the way through 2021. It’s still a wild world, but I’m signed up to get my first vaccine dose on Monday, so that light at the end of the tunnel is looking just a little bit brighter. Here’s some stuff from my world this week. I wrote another article for…
A week or so ago, I tweeted the following: I loathe the use of "QA" as a verb to replace test. E.g. "Facebook needs to QA their features better" – that doesn’t make any f*ing sense. Paul Carvalho (@can_test) didn’t agree – he stated that test is a subset of qa, and that since he…
A few points of interest from my week. My quote to ponder is from Jerry Weinberg – “Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.” Take a moment to reflect how often you’ve seen this yourself firsthand….
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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.