avensec

One differentiation I find is that, I typically respond to questions or ask a question. In that way, I don't believe it was part of the problem, but demonstrated a pattern of improvement, I'd love to see (I responded to a direct question). More questions and dialog! :)

There are lots of replies; I'll add my theory. Threads aren't conducive to conversations that build psychological safety and trust. A natural conversation of curiosity/questions, in 1:1 or small group settings, doesn't exist. This leads to talking *at* each other instead of with each other. The reduction in empathy follows.

Thanks for asking the question and spawning the conversation threads!

Reading through the comments, I'm quite shocked to see how many deterrent conversations are happening without any understanding of the underlying tech stacks being tested. Testcontainers can be fantastic, especially when you are facing test environment overhead challenges, assuming you have the appropriate architectures / service boundaries to support it. I believe there is more code out there in existence with architectures that make using Testcontainers more challenging than it is worth.

> senior management in many companies is basically a high school clique. Behavioral problems that would get normal people fired are sometimes tolerated in VP, C-levels, even directors sometimes, and working in such environments is trying.

I didn't see any other comments on this part, and want to give a huge +1. I use to wonder how overall cultures got so misaligned with what Sr. Leadership was saying in open sessions. The amount of contradiction in what they say in large groups, and what they *do* in reality, is the smart lower layers of the org seeing right through the BS. It was eye opening to be able to see behind the curtain.

This mantra has served me well for the past five years: My phone is there when I need it, not when the infinity of the internet wants my attention.

My work/friends/family have gotten used to the full-time Do Not Disturb. They can call me if they need me, which my Garmin watch will show.

re: COVID part. The conclusion leaped to is likely inaccurate and not what he meant by the ambiguous "experts" remark.

Their company was involved more in the supply and distribution of COVID vaccines, based on data collection of COVID metrics. The experts he may be referring to are the ones who were painting an inaccurate representation of COVID case distribution. Political messaging shadowed the reality of case distributions by region—inaccurate reporting of COVID cases due to a lack of pipeline and procedures for data collection.

In this scenario, the "experts" would be individuals ignoring the reality of the data collected and making decisions based on other motivations.

Soft tools for people. Some individuals need training on how to manage remote vs in-person effectively.

General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we want to influence the future.

I was in a similar introspective state of my life when someone recommended "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl. To anyone reading the comment wanting more, I'd recommend the book. The audiobook is only 4h 45m.

This is well-stated and appreciated positivity. It is disheartening to see the detractor/logic-leaping replies that followed. Thank you for writing it.

Really appreciate this link. I used a LG C2 as my monitor and I've been having trouble with HDR content in W11/Chrome for years. I always end up using Edge or otherwise for Youtube HDR, and this helped me debug.

Point well made, but I think they were trying to correct the usage of Responsibility. Responsible = Who does the work, which, of course you can outsource.

This likely belongs in the Who is Hiring post @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37739028. Good luck on your search.

I read it as discourse related to a binary proposal without any nuance. The root being "Whose responsibility is it to keep track of accomplishments: The Manager or the Individual?"

Seems pretty darn clear after watching one of the Youtube TITO videos. Same steering wheel, same design on the air vents with different inserts, same entertainment cutouts, etc..

As the parent, just wanted to give a quick reply with thanks.

My reply here is meta given the topic, but I almost didn't submit my original comment because I've seen how these threads go. Any additional information in my comment would lead to even more complexity/areas to pick apart. Less information becomes easy targets for flame. I can understand why the talk was pulled, because they often seem to result in negative PR, more than any potential positive influence. I felt the same with submitting my comment.

Thank you for offering positive suggestions and discussion to the topic.

I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering group at the company. Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of has had a higher ratio of females, but not necessarily of any specific background.

My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence.

A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position.

The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.

If you are marketing to the right audience, then ignore the fuzz. In my experience, most solutions aren't marketing to the correct audience.

In the Quality Engineering/SDET realm, I get dozens of emails a week for low/no-code solutions around test automation. I get at least one or two calls a day from someone pitching their solutions. I don't care about their no-code RPA solution because I've got fantastic engineers writing actual code.

If they knew their market, they would target the finance users, the ERP systems, the SFDC and SAP engineers, or the manufacturing bridge groups. Places where they could actually get a sale from individuals who want to bridge the technical-automation gap.

> I wasn't convinced I actually had the skillsets they needed for what they were offering, their tech interview was a take-home assignment and at most an hour of reviewing it. I didn't feel like I had earned it.

"Feels like" is often be influenced by complexity. It was easy, but you expected it to be hard, so it must be wrong. It could be interpreted as a red flag, or it really could have been that simple. Keep an eye out for things that feel like they should be harder. Once you feel like you grasp the disconnect, ask questions to find out if it is an actual red flag, or, if bias was clouding.

No way to know for certain without making a decision, but the thought work to finding an answer will assist with the long-term confidence of the decision.

Yes, but in a different way. I work in Quality Engineering, and the scope of maturity in testing distributed systems has been exhausting.

Reading other comments from the thread, I see similar frustrations from teams I partner with. How to employ patterns like contact, hypothesis, doubles, or shape/data systems (etc.) typically gets conflated with System testing. Teams often disagree on the boundaries of the system start leaning towards System Testing, and end up adding additional complexity in tests that could be avoided.

My thought is that I see the desire to control more scope presenting itself in test. I typically find myself doing some bounded context exercises to try to hone in on scope early.

One of the reasons we test is for confidence. If we can't trust a test, it isn't providing value. It may give negative value due to the time required to inspect the failure or general erosion of trust in the test suite.

One pattern that we can apply to increase visibility or ownership is stability metrics. If a test must/should be fixed many times can be teased out once you can view these metrics. On failure, display that this test has passed in this configuration for the past x-amount of runs. - Pass the last 100 runs? High likelihood the test is highlighting a bug and must be engaged on. - 95% pass rate in the last 100 runs? It may be time to quarantine this test and add it to the remediation backlog. Your level of acceptable false-positive rates may differ depending on team velocity and suite runtimes.

"How many tests are in quarantine, what is the average time-to-fix, and what direction is this trending" are valuable metrics that we can utilize to find ownership and highlight the technical debt.

As you said, culture around such patterns isn't always there.

I appreciate the article for visibility as we could always use more knowledge and partners in the Quality Engineering space. Just recognize that these are relatively low-hanging fruit/early maturity concepts in test engineering.

Are you are discovering these for the first time? Great, happy that you are getting exposed! If you read these and think, "we could utilize these concepts with our engineers(test or not)," I would encourage you to look at it from an organizational perspective. You may want to add someone to your team(s) with these skillsets. Most automation testers understand these concepts well and can help you on the next-level maturity items.

Similar but different. I recently closed out a Quality Engineering/CoE position and conducted two awkward phone screens where the "candidates" were running sales pitches for their side-gigs.

The discussions started normally, but quickly became transparent. When I mentioned a challenge, they explained how they used some product/company to help with the solution. I thought it sounded familiar but couldn't figure out from where. After the candidate answered a second question similarly, I searched and found the site.

The product is one of these consultancy projects is a thin wrapper on top of some other popular product. It finally hit me- Why the product sounded familiar is because I saw it on this candidate's LinkedIn page, listed as a founder. The other candidate, same situation, only he was a "board member."

Webcache since it is now removed. You can still see the strange reviews, but this cache does not have the "Amazon's choice" label.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HeZP55...

Preference for semi-open team spaces, but not as far as offices-for-all. If the choice was binary, I'd choose open.

My team has an open area, but it is semi-closed off from other teams. There were two desks which would have had their monitors in full view of others walking by, so we rearranged our area and put up semi-high walls to combat this. Much to the disdain of other management who feared "others will follow suit." Spoiler: They did.

37, US, Sr. Manager level in Quality Engineering. The majority of my meetings I'd rather not have in front of my team (ICs, Leads, Managers, etc). Partly because I have to talk a lot, partly because people ended up asking questions about things they overheard which weren't concrete yet. If something is changing, if I am working through collaboration, or there is a disagreement, I don't want to distract my team with that fluid information. I mention this as it puts me squarely in the position of a manager who spends a lot of time in a room but wants his team in a semi-open area. All of my bosses have offices and most of my peers have offices. I chose to bypass my office to be close to my team. That said, I am in an unreservable room for 3-5 hours a day.

As a side note for this transition, I used the department budget to buy everyone a pair of QC35s. I budget a pair for every new hire as well. It is a bandage over root cause _and_ created conflict across other groups, but I gladly took the heat. Soon that budget will come out of the New Hire Resources pool!

- Many well known people in tech are charlatans.

This is something I learned first hand in the previous year. I joined a company that purposely seeks out known entities in a specific space. These are people I've seen do tech-talks and lead meetups. I specifically joined with the idea of mentorship and gleaning as much information as I could.

What I learned is that some of the ideas being pitched via tech-talk were actually introducing some of the most convoluted and inefficient practices into the department. I learned that some of those individuals were in untouchable ivory tower positions, and crossing them would cost you your job. I learned that upper-management didn't actually know a damn thing about the space and sought after those known entities to cover that gap and make themselves appear more relevant.