[Baypiggies] Need Career advice

[Seth Friedman]

Hi there,

Depending on what you mean by educational - a job where you're exposed to a
lot of different stuff to learn is how I'm interpreting - I'd suggest QA.
 Granted I'm biased and always found it difficult to hire QA as it does tend
to burn people out for all kinds of wrong organizational reasons.

But, at the right company, it can be a delight, like a development gig that
can be about the whole ecosystem, or whatever parts of it you're interested
in pursuing.  It has a sort of bad rep as something like "verify a blue
button exists and is blue", but it's a field that can really be taken far in
any one of a number of directions, at a great deal of depth.  Someplace with
a product that is itself technical, say a data warehousing place, the work
can be a satisfying mix of development (building test automation and
dashboard visualization of that data - that, guess what?!, has only internal
consumers so you're free to have more fun with it than a consumer-facing UI
- personally i like smiley and frowny faces) ... interfacing with product
"how many significant digits did you picture this showing?" ... interfacing
with ops "umm, this new feature causes 5% more DB CPU usage, is this going
to melt our prod databases?".

The other thing I've come to see is that it pretty much takes a developer
skillset to be able to execute as QA effectively, at least for any
product/site that has external APIs.  I may not know or care about the list
of caveats to the documented API to twitter, but if I were QA there I
imagine I would need to be able to go to the devs, credibly, with an
understanding/respect of external developer's expectations.  Like, building
my own client (i've had QA interviews where the interview was a) say hello
to the hiring folks, b) write a client to their API, c) present my client
and the exercise building it to the team, all on site).

My $.002,
seth

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ladies and gents,
> I am currently employed, but I'd like something more educational than
> what I'm doing right now. My experience is mainly in computational
> finance and SQL. So, is anyone hiring?
> --
> Sent from my mobile device
> Envoyait de mon telephone mobil
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