What were the biggest challenges you faced during the first years working as a developer/tester?
Were these mostly technical (e.g. unknown tech stack, in-house framework), social (difficult colleagues, bosses, etc) or was it something else?
As a tester, the biggest technicalish issue in the beginning was that a lot of testing is tribal knowledge. I'm in Pittsburgh, and there's 1 university in the whole city that has a testing class. And it focuses only on unit testing, so even if I went there (I didn't) and took that class (still didn't), I wouldn't know how to be a QA. (The course textbook is open sourced if this topic interests anyone).
It wasn't even issues with how to Selenium or Jasmine or whatever. It was just like how do I write addequite coverage or think in a way to write tests like a user would use the system. Or what is regression testing or integration testing or acceptance testing and what's black boxes and stuff...
Which kind of leads into the more social issue I had which I still have 4 years later: what the hell is anyone saying? I'm not from a CS major. Just half the words people say are confusing. Day 1 they wanted me to go to stand up (that's a noun?) where people were talking about not having bandwidth (get a better cable provider then?) to do everything this sprint (why are we running?) and how that was the biggest blocker (okay, context clues, woo!) and impediment (speech?).
Like, it's a whole new world and people take for granted that they're immursed in it. I felt like an anthropologist (or mathematician, I guess) studying a new group of people for months. When I onboard someone now, I tell them to go to the meetings, nod occationally, and IM me when something confusing happens. That way they look attentive but can have their wtf moments over Slack where I can explain and they can refer back to it later.
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As a tester, the biggest technicalish issue in the beginning was that a lot of testing is tribal knowledge. I'm in Pittsburgh, and there's 1 university in the whole city that has a testing class. And it focuses only on unit testing, so even if I went there (I didn't) and took that class (still didn't), I wouldn't know how to be a QA. (The course textbook is open sourced if this topic interests anyone).
It wasn't even issues with how to Selenium or Jasmine or whatever. It was just like how do I write addequite coverage or think in a way to write tests like a user would use the system. Or what is regression testing or integration testing or acceptance testing and what's black boxes and stuff...
Which kind of leads into the more social issue I had which I still have 4 years later: what the hell is anyone saying? I'm not from a CS major. Just half the words people say are confusing. Day 1 they wanted me to go to stand up (that's a noun?) where people were talking about not having bandwidth (get a better cable provider then?) to do everything this sprint (why are we running?) and how that was the biggest blocker (okay, context clues, woo!) and impediment (speech?).
Like, it's a whole new world and people take for granted that they're immursed in it. I felt like an anthropologist (or mathematician, I guess) studying a new group of people for months. When I onboard someone now, I tell them to go to the meetings, nod occationally, and IM me when something confusing happens. That way they look attentive but can have their wtf moments over Slack where I can explain and they can refer back to it later.