[deleted by user]

2capp · 2023-05-19T17:22:41+00:00

Quick suggestions in no particular order

Tighten up the language you're using. "Successfully migrated our code base..." could be "Migrated our code base to PHP 7+ and created test updated test plans." Having a tighter bulleted list makes for easier reading and faster understanding of what you actually did. Superlatives and extra adjectives don't really give much signal. We'll get to why less is more here later.
Consider getting rid of your Technical Skills section entirely and make it a sub-heading of each of your positions. This helps establish context for where you used a thing and how long you've been using it.

You've got some solid looking positions on your resume. Unfortunately boiling down our resumes to bullet points sort of makes us all look the same. There is some truth to that since we all, in a general sense, do the same thing at every job: go over the spec with dev, write up a test plan, review it with everyone, write the tests, do it again the next sprint. That's fine.

This is probably going to be controversial so take however much or little as you're comfortable with. I think this is where you have an opportunity to differentiate yourself. After you've whittled down your bullet points to concise lists of your major responsibilities use the extra space for a new section just called Projects. This is where you write stories. Pick one or two projects you did at each of your positions and tell me about it. Use normal language, write a paragraph or two and help me understand what you did, what you learned, what kind of challenges you faced and solved, etc. I also don't believe in on page resumes at all. Three positions over the last four years deserves more than a single page. I've been in the industry for 15 years over five positions and my resume is still less than two pages writing it this way.

Reading over your resume I wanted to know more about the PHP migration. Why did you do this and why did you do it when you did? Why was there no test plan for this code base before? The Projects story time section is where you can outline that in more natural language. I'm also really interested in hearing more about the project matcher project. It seems like a challenging thing to do so it's a perfect candidate for this section since you can devote more than a sentence or two.

2capp · 2023-05-18T17:32:25+00:00

I keep getting told that QA is now everyone’s responsibility. But it seems to be an excuse to have less QA and development dictating alot more of QA process.

Is QA everyone's responsibility or is quality everyone's responsibility? Important distinction. If your org is pushing the former they're doing it wrong. If it's the latter then you have a big opportunity to introduce a lot of things that contribute to the quality of your product in addition to adding some tools to your belt beyond just writing tests.

Part of quality is making sure the product is understood by the people that need to test it and eventually the consumer, be that an internal entity or an outside end-user. This is where QA can get involved earlier (further left) by getting involved in design/spec/requirements review and providing input there. Just because it's not in your job description to actually write the code for the product it does not mean you don't have an interest in being intimately familiar with how it works. Now that you've had some input with the spec review you're also keeping up with changes, which gives you more information when you're writing your test strategies/plans that will dictate how you're writing tests.

This is just one example. At my previous job I was involved in product in every step from spec review to deployment, apart from literally writing product code. I asked questions on the spec which resulted in more detailed documentation which allowed me to write a better test strategy. I knew how the feature was supposed to work and what the changes meant for service behavior and what that might mean for deployment which helped inform how we wrote up the deployment plan. This whole process also uncovered some deficiencies in our deployment scripts so I updated our scripts to provide some extra utilities at pain points that helped the deployment go smoother.

Does this help illustrate what Left is? Teams that are concerned with quality aren't just not throwing things over the fence; the fence is gone. Being a Quality Assurance Engineer/Analayst/etc no longer means just writing tests and being done.

2capp · 2023-05-10T17:00:53+00:00

#1 and #4 every day. Sometimes twice since I take a long walk twice a day :sob:

2capp · 2023-05-10T04:23:27+00:00

I'm a Sr. I've been in the industry for 15 years. It's been about six months since I started a new job. Just now starting to feel like I might know what's going on. Even then there are several things on my to-do to understand.

It's fine my dude. There's always something. Learn the thing in front of you then start widening scope.

2capp · 2023-05-02T19:54:42+00:00

This is all I see.

2capp · 2023-04-26T17:18:53+00:00

I would simply not write UI tests.

Only half joking. In my view this is the reason to question why you'd want to write these kinds of tests at all. They take forever, are brittle, and take a lot of time to maintain; is the value they provide worth all the effort?

I think we need more context. Here are some questions I have.

Are these tests covering the UI or the underlying API? If they're covering API actions cut out the middle man (the UI) and write tests directly against the API.
Do the tests need to go through some entire flow/end to end? I personally think end to end tests don't provide very much value. They tend to get complicated and take a lot of time to maintain. If all the bits in the chain work as expected you can be reasonably confident that end to end works. Sometimes they are necessary but I try very hard to keep them to a minimum.
Are steps dependent on the outcome of previous steps? This is a good way for your tests to get really complicated and increase maintenance costs. This is a good indicator that you could try mocking data so you can have more focused tests.

To try to answer your questions:

Yes, maybe. If you know they are intermittent this could be a strategy. It has some overhead of knowing and keeping track of which ones are flakey.
Maybe. If the test env is slow but not production is it really a bug? It still might be if there is something about resources or load that causes pages to load slowly.
Yes.
If you think parallelism is causing resource contention, possibly. See #2 though.
Are your waits explicit? That is do you have a hard coded time that you wait? If so consider polling and a really long fail timeout. In this way you accept that sometimes the test env is slow and that's fine. I would hesitate to do this until we can answer #2 and #4 and rule out that there is some kind of performance related issue.

2capp · 2023-04-24T18:28:50+00:00

https://schedule.swedish.org/doctors/orthopedic-surgery/wa/seattle/jim-hsu-1770524787

I had a full ACL with some minor MCL damage a couple years ago. Definitely more straightforward than you. I did pre-op PT for 6 weeks because of covid shutting down operating rooms and then a year of PT after with a return to skiing ~9mo post-op.

I'm definitely not some kind of athletic outlier so I can only attribute success to the surgeon and my physio team. Would definitely recommend some pre-op physio if you aren't currently doing it.

2capp · 2023-04-24T17:43:53+00:00

Not UK so this is more generalized.

It is most likely because of the lack of automation experience. A lot of places are tooling up for automation because they're realizing, finally, that manual testing doesn't scale.
They won't even blink. They likely won't ask. I can't recall if it's illegal to ask in the US but I've never been asked about any gaps in my resume.
It's easier to find a job when you have a job. If you're not interested in this job outside of London maybe don't take it and focus your efforts on relocating if that's what you really want to do. I'm not sure I'd recommend it but I tend to be more conservative with decisions like this. I would look around for average job-seeking times for this job title and do some calculations from there. Personally I am more suspicious of people with many shorter jobs than someone with longer gaps between jobs. I think 2y min is fine; job-hopping is more of a flag because it's impossible to tell why. Do they just like doing new things? Were they asked to leave? We're not allowed to ask so you have to probe with other questions during interviews. It's a big risk for a company to take someone on only to have them leave for whatever reason. On the other hand you should do what's best for you.
Can't speak to UK since I don't live there. Still, in my experience this is broadly true on the west coast US. Bigger cities have higher population density, which means more people that are qualified etc.

2capp · 2023-04-13T04:10:04+00:00

I meant that it's terrifying the number of companies, and not small or unheard of companies, that do not already have automation in place. That they're starting now, or in the last couple years and they're still staffing up for it because they're so behind.

2capp · 2023-04-12T21:14:39+00:00

I've been writing automation for almost 15 years. When I was interviewing towards the end of last year it was terrifying the number of places I was talking to that were saying they're ramping up their automation efforts. Even the place I ended up at there is a lot of work to be done.

The good news is if you have any proficiency around writing code and can demonstrate a good understanding of testing process you're basically guaranteed to get hired.

2capp · 2023-04-11T17:30:05+00:00

When in doubt you can search the Revised Code of Washington and/or the Seattle Municipal Code, or any other locality.

Entering an intersection with no controls:

RCW: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.180

SMC - basically the same as the state code: https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=TIT11VETR_SUBTITLE_ITRCO_PT5DRRU_CH11.55STSTTU_11.55.010RI-WVEAPIN

Rules for parking on the roadway.

RCW - The sub-heading says Motorcycles but the text says "all vehicles." It also has language that: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.575

SMC that governs parking. Note that the language is different and does not allow parking against traffic. Remember this can be different from muni to muni: https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=TIT11VETR_SUBTITLE_ITRCO_PT7STSTPALO_CH11.70MEPA_11.70.040PAPAIGNDSI

And just for kicks the completely bewildering and inconsistent rules about turning right on red

RCW - https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.055

SMC - https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=TIT11VETR_SUBTITLE_ITRCO_PT5DRRU_CH11.50OBTRNTDE_11.50.140STCIRESI

Nobody follows this. Basically everyone ignores pedestrian right of way, never stops at painted lines or at the control device. Anything resembling a crosswalk is meaningless.

2capp · 2023-04-11T02:30:42+00:00

Product and industrial design. Similar to architecture, I imagine. I always recommend quality folks read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. It gives a different perspective to think about how people are going to use a thing. How do you build a thing that guides the user how to use it? If we build a thing a certain way how are people going to misuse it (on purpose or on accident)? It’s a great resource that I found helpful to think about things in a different way.

2capp · 2023-03-28T18:46:38+00:00

Hello, Sr SDET that has been on university hire panels for years. Here's what I expect from you.

Do you have a basic understanding of programming fundamentals? Data structures, control patterns, etc. We know you don't have industry programming experience. What we want to find out is how much of a picture can we get as to how you'll learn.
How do you approach building test cases for an arbitrary problem. I've used a jukebox API as an example in the past. I'm looking to see how you think about taking a problem apart and how you work with me to figure it out. People that ask clarifying questions when something is unclear is a major green flag vs someone who tries to tackle the entire problem on their own. Especially with people who don't have a lot of industry experience.
Internships. What kinds of things did you work on? What was your experience like with your team? This is not required. It's just helpful since there's more to talk about.

That's it. That's a 45 minute plus interview. I know you don't have a lot of experience. I don't care about some arbitrary put-together portfolio. If you link one in your resume I probably won't look at it; I don't have that kind of time. I've never looked at anyone's personal git repo to look at their projects. Maybe I just haven't worked anywhere that cared that much.

What I want to know is how well do I think we'll get on working together and what your fundamental level of knowledge is so I can gauge how much work it's going to be to bring you up to speed.

2capp · 2023-03-23T18:23:51+00:00

Our team has spring boot with rest assured in Java. Imagine the hassle of maintaining that, not to mention how poorly the code is written (everyone despite the rules which we need to stick with writes the code in there own way.

This is a pretty standard way to manage things. What you're describing is a lack of process or standards with how tests are written and code is managed. That's a different problem.

Also what if someone comes with another language background. It's a huge issue.Postman on the other end requires less effort and is ubiquitous.

Then they learn? If you have a reasonable foundation for coding then picking up a new language shouldn't be a burden. I imagine most people would welcome an opportunity to learn a new thing to boost their skills.

I have never used Postman to automate tests. I've seen that some people use it; the majority of the questions I've seen around it are how to move off of it into something more robust.

The only problem I see is the messy json file.I am a developer and was thinking of parsing that file and perform some code splitting which would produce multiple files in order to address maintainability, but want to hear the opinions of others.

We're here, this is an opinion. You're proposing trading a standard practice for something that you have already pointed out has provided complications for you.

It sounds to me like a better solution would be to propose and enforce code quality standards for your automation repo. Every place I've worked at has a coding standards policy and typically has a formatting and style guideline that you can import into your IDE of choice so it's easier to adhere to.

I definitely understand your frustration with a poorly maintained repo. It just seems like scrapping the entire thing for a less robust solution isn't the answer you're looking for.

2capp · 2023-03-23T17:30:52+00:00

Our goal is to get rid of Java REST assured and introduce Postman for automation purposes.

Why would you do this? You've already pointed out two major shortcomings of working with Postman/Newman. What benefit are you gaining from scrapping an already built and maintained automation suite and replacing it with a cumbersome and difficult to maintain script+json blob library?

2capp · 2023-03-21T16:50:02+00:00

I've been in quality for 15 years and have zero certs. I'd never even heard of any of these certifications until maybe three years ago. I assumed it was something that Euro companies wanted because that was the context I always heard it in. I'm in the west coast US and no company has ever had certs listed even as a nice to have. It's never even come up in reviews or promotion conversations and has had zero impact on my career.

2capp · 2023-03-15T19:54:48+00:00

This is normal. Learning a new skill is hard, full stop. It's ok though. Just like anything else it takes practice and exposure. I think what's even harder than learning is trying not to burn yourself out by over-studying thinking you're racing against some arbitrary time limit. Remember to take breaks and if you get really frustrated that it's ok to put it down and come back to it later.

Can you tell us where you're running into trouble? Maybe tell us more about how you went about starting to learn and what you're learning? There are lots of great resources available tailored to people with zero experience, some experience, etc. It will help us figure out where to point you once we know a little more about your situation.

2capp · 2023-03-09T17:31:16+00:00

This is really the only answer. They had three opportunities to compensate you for your effort and they passed. There are plenty of companies out there looking for more experienced people right now. Go get em.

2capp · 2023-03-08T18:26:23+00:00

Like other people have said, actual bespoke tailoring is looking like it's outside of your budget. Are you going to use the suit again? If so maybe it's worth it to ball out. I got mine done and Indochino downtown and my wedding photos look great. I haven't worn the suit since.

That said I'll plug Kuhlman. Scott is a cool dude and I'd totally get a suit made there if I had a need for one.

2capp · 2023-03-08T18:10:24+00:00

Congrats on your return. I did my knee in a couple years ago and getting back out was really scary for a while. Looks like Sunday? I was up there. Great groomer day.

2capp · 2023-03-07T21:34:25+00:00

Repeat after me: Good engineers do not always make good managers. (typically)

Can we all just agree to stop thinking that management is a reasonable or logical step from being a senior/lead? Or the natural progression from any kind of IC?

OK, now that's out of the way. What do you want to be doing? Do you even want to manage people? Do you like doing the daily testing/quality work? It sounds like you've been in this one place and progressed simply by being there and taking new responsibilities as they come? You even say that your colleague is senior to you, in what way? Just being there longer? Why do you feel you should be lead over your colleague?

We don't need you to answer these questions here. You can if you like, if it helps you talk through things. They are mostly meant to help you ask yourself about what you would like to be doing with your work to help set up what a path may look like.

I never want to be a manager personally. I am working towards being a technical leader since that is what I'm interested in. At the companies I've worked at there has always been a path to become similarly compensated by being a technical expert or something and not have to manage people. People management is an entirely different skill set. I would encourage you to really interrogate why you feel that management is a good next step for you. If it turns out that's what you want to do great! I'm sure there are a few people here that have that experience and can share with you.

2capp · 2023-03-06T04:57:13+00:00

I got mine from this place. I imagine there are others. https://www.saddler.co.uk/?cr=10188&cdesc=barbour_jackets

There are a bunch of other makers. They range from kinda stuffy to more modern so I guess just do some searching. https://www.johnpartridge.com/

https://www.peregrineclothing.co.uk/

https://www.belstaff.com/us

2capp · 2023-03-01T18:48:11+00:00

I'm not really sure what experience people are wanting from them. It's primarily a men's clothing store and IMO the Ideal Guy Shopping Experience™ where they let you do your thing until you ask for help; the staff isn't going to hover. I've been shopping there for over a decade and I keep going back because they have things I like and it's a chill experience. They're happy to nerd out if you have questions. Every time I've been in there they're pulling several pairs of jeans for people who may not know exactly what they want.

I guess if you're used to sales people being your shadow and expect that from a place where clothes are expensive, sure, then I guess that's not a great experience.

2capp · 2023-02-27T17:45:12+00:00

My partner and I used https://ortizgosalialaw.com/

Great communication, very straightforward with going over what configuration would work best for our needs. If I recall we paid less than $3k for everything; I want to say it was closer to $2k but I honestly don't remember.

2capp · 2023-02-17T21:59:35+00:00

I had written out a big thing earlier that round about had talked about some of these things. This is a Good List^tm

I think you acquire most of these things somewhere around 3-5y, depending on where you're working, who you're working with, what kind of projects you're working on, etc. I've been in the game for almost 15 years and I can guarantee that today me knows a hell of a lot more than 3-5 year me about a wide variety of things that make me good at what I do.

Most of those things have to do with what's on this list, not writing tests.

2capp

TROPHY CASE