Applying for Programming Jobs

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Chrisb3

Thinking about perhaps being a tester first, and perhaps working on a codeportfolio while I gain some experience. Anyone have any experiences doing that?

This is what I did. My only recommendation is that... if you want to start out as a Tester... the gaming industry pays like ass.

I was hired by my internship at a startup straight out of College and was paid ~50k/year (nearly 55 w/ bonuses, etc...). Entry QA positions paying 50k+ are incredibly rare (Expect 35-40k); I was incredibly lucky. Went on to a media software company a year and a half later and stayed there for six months. I have one more day at this god forsaken company.

Either way, I spent those two years boning up on development knowledge at home, working on personal projects, etc... along with networking (VERY IMPORTANT). About a month ago a friend of mine mentioned there were openings for an entry level development position at the company he works at. A few people at the company vouched for me (Yay networking!) and they brought me in for an interview. 2 days later I had an offer at 60k+/year.

To sum it up. If you are going to go the QA->Dev Path:
- NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK... shit NETWORK ANYHOW IF YOU DO ANYTHING. This is by far the most important aspect of your job. Even if you suck ass you can get a job if people like you.
- Keep your knowledge current. Study, work on projects, whatever... don't let yourself fall behind.
- Talk with Developers at the company you land a job at. Go to lunch with them, listen to them. You will pickup on things.
- Try to be involved with performance/automation. Don't get stuck with manual testing only.

[Chrisb3]

Originally Posted by Vinen

This is what I did. My only recommendation is that... if you want to start out as a Tester... the gaming industry pays like ass.

I was hired by my internship at a startup straight out of College and was paid ~50k/year (nearly 55 w/ bonuses, etc...). Entry QA positions paying 50k+ are incredibly rare (Expect 35-40k); I was incredibly lucky. Went on to a media software company a year and a half later and stayed there for six months. I have one more day at this god forsaken company.

Either way, I spent those two years boning up on development knowledge at home, working on personal projects, etc... along with networking (VERY IMPORTANT). About a month ago a friend of mine mentioned there were openings for an entry level development position at the company he works at. A few people at the company vouched for me (Yay networking!) and they brought me in for an interview. 2 days later I had an offer at 60k+/year.

To sum it up. If you are going to go the QA->Dev Path:
- NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK... shit NETWORK ANYHOW IF YOU DO ANYTHING. This is by far the most important aspect of your job. Even if you suck ass you can get a job if people like you.
- Keep your knowledge current. Study, work on projects, whatever... don't let yourself fall behind.
- Talk with Developers at the company you land a job at. Go to lunch with them, listen to them. You will pickup on things.
- Try to be involved with performance/automation. Don't get stuck with manual testing only.

Thanks that is some good advice.

Basically I'm assuming that entry level QA is going to be easier to get into than entry level programming, I went to a careers advisor last week and the thing that came up was my complete lack of experience doing anything and being a games tester came up as a solution.
Even if someone will take me for programming as I am now I'm not confident that I'd be able to do it (probally just low confidence talking, but I'm sure that my programming skills suck at the moment).
As a tester I'm thinking that they won't expect much from me, so it'll be easier to get and do the job while I brush up on my programming and confidence.

Money isn't an issue by the way, I'm pretty good at not spending much which is why I've never really had a job before (beyond a few months as a barman). My only luxury item is beer and the occasional game/wow gamecard.

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Chrisb3

Thanks that is some good advice.

Basically I'm assuming that entry level QA is going to be easier to get into than entry level programming, I went to a careers advisor last week and the thing that came up was my complete lack of experience doing anything and being a games tester came up as a solution.
Even if someone will take me for programming as I am now I'm not confident that I'd be able to do it (probally just low confidence talking, but I'm sure that my programming skills suck at the moment).
As a tester I'm thinking that they won't expect much from me, so it'll be easier to get and do the job while I brush up on my programming and confidence.

Money isn't an issue by the way, I'm pretty good at not spending much which is why I've never really had a job before (beyond a few months as a barman). My only luxury item is beer and the occasional game/wow gamecard.

Thats not really how you should think about QA. In many ways it's more demanding then development... that is unless you are in a crappy sweat shop QA shop (Typical entry Gaming QA shit from what I've heard. Bunch of people hired with no drive and just want to "test games" (read Play them)).

Dealing with developers can suck ass. Half the job is figuring out each developer you work with and what needs to be done to get them to listen / view you as an intelligent person. Many are very condescending towards QA. If your project manager sucks QA might start picking up for their slack... I had to drive a major portion of the project I just worked on (Another reason I left the company... seriously, don't want to do her fucking job... When a developer asks you their priorities something is fucked up).

Anyhow-
I'd recommend reading the following three books. I found the first two incredibly valuable when I went into QA. The third is valuable for anyone as it's an incredible book on Networking.

#1 Very good book. You should read it... not overly boring
Amazon.com: Lessons Learned in Software Testing: Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord: Books

#2 Boring as shit. But has some very important information in it.
Amazon.com: Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition: Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Q. Nguyen: Books

#3 Incredible networking book.
Amazon.com: Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time: Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz: Books

[Tenks]

Originally Posted by Chrisb3

Thinking about perhaps being a tester first, and perhaps working on a codeportfolio while I gain some experience. Anyone have any experiences doing that?

Alright this is exactly what I did so I can help out a bit.

My degree required a mandatory year of co/op education. Basically getting an internship. For 3 quarters I did not attend school, I just went to work. My job was as an automated software tester. Here is the trick though, if you are just simply doing non-automated software testing you probably won't touch code very often. I can break it down how it was at my place:

Automated Software Testers: We leveraged a (now) IBM program called Rational Functional Tester (RFT.) We were somewhat early adopters of this software, which was originally called XDE tester, so there were some growing pains. At the core of it you would write scripts in Java to automatically click on either a Java application window or an internet browser (IE & Firefox were supported.) This allowed me to write tons of lines of Java using RFT's classes. This is what I did for a while. After being there for about 2 years I moved in more towards the back-end and this is where I really learned my Java.

RFT is a good program, at its core. However, there are alot of things that could be made easier for "scripters" if they just made some back-end modifications. So me and one other intern did these changes for RFT. We had about an 1800 line class we'd import to every single script to make it's life easier. Well, technically we JAR'd all the files so we had an 1800 line class and about 12 or so 150-200 line classes to "help out" with RFT's short comings. We would reflect methods, we'd thread when needed and we'd condense RFT's verbose syntax down. It was ALOT of back-end Java programming work but it gave me many lessons learned.

After this my company was bought out and I stopped getting much work to do. The program we were required to automate was fully automated for every scenario possible. The database was fully normalized and followed all relational concepts. This is when I started to make my code portfolio. I'd assign myself various tasks to write. Mostly applications with a Swing interface (so I could leverage MVC) and doing some tasks. I'd try to incorporate OOD patterns into all of them and make sure the code was elegant. I'd spend maybe 1.5-2weeks per task then log the code in my portfolio.

Manual Software Testers: These guys did nothing in Java. I was never one so I can't say exactly what they did but I worked with my fair share. For the most part instead of writing scripts to automatically click on things these guys just click on them themselves. It is literally clicking on a window for 8hours a day and filling out bug reports. You never see the program you're working on's source code nor do you worry about the automated source code. Sometimes they would run my automated test suites and tell me if things were not working in my code and I'd fix it. For the most part these guys required no programming knowledge nor did they gain any from the position. The only knowledge they'd gain is if they would bounce some ideas or gain some insight from some of the seasoned automated testers. I know I had to explain what an interface is and why you'd use it at least 5 times at the job haha.


Anyways I hope that helped. I was an automated tester for about 4 years and it was a great experience. Getting paid nearly $15 an hour throughout all of college helped a ton with the bills as well. Since you're already graduated I guess that doesn't matter too much now, though!

You may not be afforded this luxery. I was lucky to get paid to create my portfolio. Howvever, every line of source was written by me and nothing was "trade secret" things. They were simply just helper programs. You may need to learn a language better then write it in your spare time.

[AladainAF]

I've been a QA engineer for several years (With my previous employeer and with current), and am making well over 70k in super-cheap-to-live Texas.

QA is not in high demand. However, QA with extensive knowledge of VS2005/8 source-level debug, or live-debugging via windbg, etc etc is in super high demand at least down here. Also, a QA engineer or tester who is creative and will do things like write "simple" programs to automate stuff, or streamline processes in a QA environment in looked highly upon. Really not your run of the mill QA.

The lowest paid QA positions here with just half of those requirements pay around $18-$20 an hour. Ones like mine where source-level debugging, and root cause analysis of defects are expected, you can expect 55-70k+ a year depending on how well you impress.

[Hachima]

Originally Posted by AladainAF

I've been a QA engineer for several years (With my previous employeer and with current), and am making well over 70k in super-cheap-to-live Texas.

QA is not in high demand. However, QA with extensive knowledge of VS2005/8 source-level debug, or live-debugging via windbg, etc etc is in super high demand at least down here. Also, a QA engineer or tester who is creative and will do things like write "simple" programs to automate stuff, or streamline processes in a QA environment in looked highly upon. Really not your run of the mill QA.

The lowest paid QA positions here with just half of those requirements pay around $18-$20 an hour. Ones like mine where source-level debugging, and root cause analysis of defects are expected, you can expect 55-70k+ a year depending on how well you impress.

Do you find yourself doing much documentation as a QA Engineer? Such as writing equivalence classes. If so what % of your time do you spend doing that?

[AladainAF]

I don't have a whole lot of documentation as a QA engineer. In my previous job, I was a QA engineer for hardware and bios (for the software part), doing a lot more documentation than I do today as strictly software. Then again, it could have to do with the my employer changing.

I spend only about ~10% of my time maintaining and writing test cases for the techs. I spend a fair amount of time in communication and work with the development team (which our dev team is fucking badass and amazing), and doing root cause analysis and building technical dispositions for our clients when they use our technology. I have to travel and go on site to our customers and handle their escalations. So I do a lot of account liason type activities too.

Its a long list. heh. But documentation, at least where I'm at, isn't one of them.

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by AladainAF

I've been a QA engineer for several years (With my previous employeer and with current), and am making well over 70k in super-cheap-to-live Texas.

QA is not in high demand. However, QA with extensive knowledge of VS2005/8 source-level debug, or live-debugging via windbg, etc etc is in super high demand at least down here. Also, a QA engineer or tester who is creative and will do things like write "simple" programs to automate stuff, or streamline processes in a QA environment in looked highly upon. Really not your run of the mill QA.

The lowest paid QA positions here with just half of those requirements pay around $18-$20 an hour. Ones like mine where source-level debugging, and root cause analysis of defects are expected, you can expect 55-70k+ a year depending on how well you impress.

I highly doubt those are entry level positions. Which is what he would be going for -