Your challenge this month, if you choose to accept it …
3 Things That Have Helped Me in My Testing Career
I’d love to know what things have helped you over your career. If you have more than three, or something you really want to talk about in depth, thats great! Can’t wait to read about them.
2022-05-31T23:00:00Z→2022-06-29T23:00:00Z
How to get involved
Write a blog on the above topic any time in June , by the 30th
It can be as long or as short as you want it to be
Share a link to the blog on this thread
Receive lots of support, encouragement, and love from the community
It’s possible you’ll get a shout out from the Ministry of Testing Twitter account @simon_tomes
I’ll also help promote from my Twitter account
If you want to get reminders to submit your blog, RSVP below
Do you find in general that “too much” of the things that fill your cup, actually drain it? In your example you get drained by too many people, but also invigorated by seeing and helping people.
Really great advice around self care. I know I definitely don’t do enough.
I really enjoyed both posts. I always see the topics as guidelines rather than rules.
Are there signs of “good culture” from your first organisation that you still look for in new companies? If so, I’d love to know what they are and why they matter to you.
Thank you. Glad there’s some leeway in the themes .
I think I look for good culture, but I don’t have an explicit shopping list in my brain - it turns up more as a feeling that things are right or not.
Off the top of my head, it’s things like:
Can everyone make meaningful contributions to a discussion, regardless of who else is involved e.g. how senior they are etc?
Is it OK to make mistakes, provided you have the right attitude about them?
Are people helped to meet a high standard, and then expected to keep meeting it (in a polite and friendly way)? Does this apply to everyone? I.e. senior people don’t get a pass.
Is time invested in stuff that doesn’t give direct customer value immediately, but will help with it over the longer term? (I don’t mean YAGNI type stuff, but tests, reviews, test infrastructure etc.)
Thats been my experience too. There are themes I’d like to see, similar to what you’ve listed, but they can vary depending on the place. Good people make places good.
Just realised I hadn’t answered the “why they matter to you” bit of your question, which is important, hard but also probably the most subjective / least universal etc.
I think that many of my attitudes and behaviours stem from an underlying emphasis on dignity. The idea that people have an intrinsic worth, and so I need to respect that and its consequences. That means I try to include everyone, try not to give anyone preferential treatment to people just because of trappings and so on. Also, as long as you can do it without e.g. drowning in a stream of comments from a squillion people, getting contributions from as many people as possible means you’re increasing your chance of finding the golden nugget. I’ve learned from summer students, and from CTOs.
Also, I’ve been in software long enough to have lived through the consequences of shortcuts many times. Sometimes there really is that little time, but not always. When my boss at the company I referred to left, we got him a T-shirt that said: Of course I don’t look busy; I did it right the first time.
Optimising for the medium to long term is good if you can do it - investing in things that will benefit future you, doing this consistently so that present you benefits from things that past you invested in etc. (As in the proverb: the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the next best time is today.)
Thanks for sharing! And congratuations on your first post in the club
it might feel like dumb or silly question
Totally agree that these show more than one person doesn’t understand something. Other people are less shy when someone else says “I don’t understand”
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