Day: October 19, 2012

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been a technology guy for almost 30 years.

Now I’m unemployed and have been looking for a new job for the better part of 18 months.

Usually I can’t get the time of day from the places that I apply to. Those placement firms that do contact me are often not much more that one step above spammers.

Got a call from one of these guys the other day, He was obviously Indian and his English pronunciation was so poor that I had no idea what he was saying. I finally got him to send me an email with the job description. His written English was only marginally better, which explains why he was trying to match me up with a position that was almost completely NOT anything I can do.

I find myself wondering things like why can’t I get any decent leads.

I’m still working on that one… but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not paying back some seriously big karmic debt.

Many of the companies that I’ve applied to, I also do occasional business with. This morning I was looking around online for a decent six or seven port USB Hub. 

As I wandered through the myriad websites I kept seeing one defect after another.

These are major, nationally known companies who advertise and sell their products on the web and yet I was seeing things like;

Dead links,

Typos,

Dialog boxes that were blank, (I mean… just a white box with nothing in it.)

Check boxes that appear unchecked yet if you do check them, to narrow your search you actually destroy your search results.

Oh, and these companies… all have either flat out told me that I wasn’t good enough to work for them, or they simply have never responded to my inquiries.

While I many not be good enough to work for them, clearly their existing staff sucks!

Part of the problem is this. 

All of these companies want someone that has long list of software development methodology certifications. To date I’ve worked with virtually every methodology.

However, I’ve never bothered to get certified in any of them, for the following reasons;

1) The certifications are very expensive and often required me to burn my vacation time and pay for the seminar and the hotel & food costs. Often as not just sitting through the seminar got you the certification.

I don’t believe in buying certifications. If that’s what I’m doing… then let me send you the $1000 and you send me the paper with my little name printed on it, and we’re done.  

I think that there should be something a little more structured and some accountability or grading must be built into the system.

Then there’s this thought… I have one miserable week of vacation. Do I spend it at an expensive seminar in a hotel conference room or do I spend that week on a beach somewhere? Let’s think about this for all of a nano-second! If I’m going to spend my vacation time and have to pay for a hotel and transportation… I’m going diving in the Caribbean!

2)  These methodologies are ever changing and in fact I’ve worked for companies where the methodology changed as frequently as the upper management did. It was simply impossible to keep up with the method du jour and as a result, the certifications were pretty much pointless.

3) These methodologies claim in some circles to be a standard. But in point of fact they are really only the framework of a software development philosophy that allows for variable implementation based on the needs, desires, and whims of the corporation where the method is being used. 

The practical upshot of this is that a new employee starts out having to learn how the company has implemented a particular methodology whether they’ve got the certifications or not.

4) I have noticed through the years that regardless of the published “Methodology”, corporate “Procedures”, or even ISO standards all go right out the window when the project is late,  (Every Software Project ends up being LATE). Which means that Agile is pretty much the defacto standard of ALL software development regardless of the corporate sales pitch.

5) I’ve actually been involved in companies where the process was so complex that it actually impeded the development and testing processes. In these companies, I only got 3 hours of work done on software I was testing per day. The other 5 or 6 hours of my day were spent in meetings, explaining what testing was being done and WHY the testing was going so slowly. 

REALLY?

In point of fact it wasn’t the methodology, it was the implementation.

I’ve always thought it was funny how almost anything begins to take on the worst aspects of religion. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Agile,SCRUM, PC vs. Mac, iPhone vs. Android…

None of them are inherently bad ideas or philosophies but all of them suffer from problems introduced by zealots.

I guess now it’s time for me to pay for some stupid seminar where the badge of honor is that I have a certificate saying I sat through the seminar.

At least I could legitimately say I’m certified in one of these things…  That 30 years of experience is irrelevant but a silly certification in a software development methodology is annoys me beyond belief.

I could take my laptop and spend the time writing and half listening. God! The soul crushing boredom  of seminars like this makes me cringe. When I’ve attended these kinds of seminars in the past,  at the end of the day I headed straight for the hotel bar and worked on anesthetizing myself… All the while having to listen to other folks from the seminar gushing about the importance of the words of the presenter… aka The Prophet. 

Meanwhile, I’m looking for the nearest exit and wondering if I can find another convenient bar where I don’t have to listen to a rehash of the day faithfully regurgitated by those who’ve drunk the kool aid.

I suppose it’s jaded cynicism on my part. A large part of my inherent resistance comes from knowing these methods, don’t make me a better tester. It just means that I’m going to be better able to recognize when someone is wasting time in needless meetings.

Which leads me back to Karma…

Am I now paying the price for not drinking the kool aid? Are the errors I’m seeing on web sites the not so subtle reminders that my choice not to play the latest corporate mental masturbation game has left me on the outside?

I still stand 100% by my conviction that as a Software Quality Assurance Analyst, knowledge or lack thereof about these philosophies won’t change the quality of the software.

Actually testing the software will. 

My Karma is to be unable to ignore software defects, and to seemingly bring out defects simply by wanting to use software as a normal user. 

I guess, I was a serious asshole to someone in a previous life. 

Now where was that catalog of obscenely priced seminars????