Co-op creative agency

Comments

The best times in my career have been when I’ve been tasked with solving interesting problems or making single-serving things, rather than working on a single specific project in the long term.

I am really good with figuring out how to do a thing, but not so much with figuring out what to do in the first place.

I feel like my best career path would be some sort of consulting, or working for a creative agency. But I really do not like the actual work model involved in either of those things.

Read more…

Thoughts on quality engineering

Comments

Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that quality/test engineering is usually seen as a bottom-of-the-barrel discipline, something that someone should want to be promoted out of rather than someplace to end up. I find that really strange.

It takes a lot of skill to look at other peoples' code and write tests to exercise it and determine correctness, and to do it well. And to have exacting standards about code quality and testability of the code in the first place.

Nearly everywhere I’ve worked, though, test engineers have been incredibly junior and not particularly skilled. Which made it part of a self-fulfilling vicious cycle; test engineers do poor-quality work (and don’t seem to bring much value to the actual product development), so low-calibre programmers end up being put in those roles, and so then they continue to do poor-quality work. Test engineering seems to be treated as glorified QA in most places.

Read more…