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.
Similar Posts
To Combine… or not?
I talk a lot (and write a bit) about software teams without separate disciplines for developers and testers (sometimes called “combined engineering” within the walls of MS – a term I find annoying and misleading – details below). For a lot of people, the concept of making software with a single team falls into the…
What comes with the gravy?
I mentioned a week ago that I was giving a talk on career tips called “Ride the Gravy Train”. I gave the talk today (which had a remarkably large turnout), and think it’s a talk I’ll deliver again (with some tweaks). Without going into details, here are the tips: do the right thing try different…
My last fifteen (or so) years
Sometime around 9:00 in the morning, exactly fifteen years ago today, I parked my car in the building 4 parking lot on the Microsoft campus. An hour or so later, I was installing a recent build of Windows 95 and trying to learn the details of my new job as quickly as possible. New Years…
The Test Automation Snowman
I was nothing short of blown away over the past few days, when some comments I made on twitter about UI automation caused a lot of folks to raise their eyebrows. Here’s the tweet in question. I’m not against discussions on the invalidity of the test automation pyramid. If you don’t like it, you use…
Politics
I’d like to announce my candidacy for…no – not that kind of politics, I thought I’d drop a few comments on office politics. Too often, people see “politics” as the evil underbelly of the corporate world, and that competency in office politics requires that you can backstab your coworkers with no remorse, find a variety…
4 Comments
Leave a Reply to Alan Page Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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.