Interviews and Jobs Blog

Creating your portfolio and increasing your chances of being hired

I am tired of looking at plain text resume full of claims and lies. Can someone come up with an evidence of their claims that can make me happy?

When I was interacting with a friend of mine who works in Dreamworks ( yeah, the company that gave us a lot of great animation movies ) he was talking about people in his industry maintaining a portfolio of their work when applying for a job.

The portfolio contains excerpt from their work or samples to the work they did that the hiring manager and interviewers can look at to determine the quality of work, skills and the technologies the person has put in use.

I think other professions and especially software industry needs to catch up with it. I vaguely remember Adam Goucher, a leading tester from Canada having written a post about a software tester creating a portfolio.

You may also want to look at this animation guy and his flash animation profile. You will be amazed just like millions of others who were after viewing it.

Here is a presentation from Shmuel Gershon from Israel who along with Issi Hazan made a presentation of how a software tester can create a portfolio

So, I am sure there are more examples that you can search for in whatever field you are in. Want to get your portfolio reviewed? Write to us : cv@interviewsandjobs.com

Will a career in testing suit you? – Part III

Welcome to Software Testing and Mental Martial Arts!
You are at the beginning era of mental martial arts way of testing software and this could act as a new lease of your life. In the traditional way of testing software, software testers follow a process and test cases set by someone else and spends their career following process without questioning it. However, in the mental martial arts way of testing software, a tester thinks, design tests, sets trap, learns about how to corner different kinds of bugs, invents new approaches, discovers tools and a lot more.
The skills that such testers work on are:
·    Questioning
·    Lateral Thinking
·    Logical Thinking
·    General Systems Thinking
·    Math
·    Programming
·    Communication
·    Model based thinking
·    Analysis
·    Cognition
·    Experimental Psychology
·    Design of Experiments
·    Reverse Engineering
·    Observation
·    Learning
·    Mind mapping
·    Brain Science
·    And 100 more.
You dont need permission or a designation to test that way but it is a mindset and a skill set that helps others understand what kind of testing you do. The mental martial arts way of testing is more popular in the western world than in India but India is catching up.
Needless to say, I belong to the community of mental martial arts testers in India and if you need a demonstration of it, get in touch with me because as a mental martial art practitioner, I speak with evidence.
If you are contemplating between what career to choose, here is an exercise that can help you: Close your eyes and imagine your brain playing a mental martial art with millions of bugs and you fighting all of them.
If you enjoyed that imagination, you probably want to do more of it.

Will a career in testing suit you? – Part II

A software bug could have the capability to wipe out a whole country.
A software bug could have the capability to wipe out a whole country.
Here is some evidence:
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the US Army’s 14th Quartermaster Detachment.
A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system’s clock. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system’s internal clock had drifted by one third of a second. Due to the closure speed of the interceptor and the target, this resulted in a miss distance of 600 meters.
The radar system had successfully detected the Scud and predicted where to look for it next, but because of the time error, looked in the wrong part of the sky and found no missile. With no missile, the initial detection was assumed to be a spurious track and the missile was removed from the system. No interception was attempted, and the missile impacted on a barracks killing 28 soldiers.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dhahran
So, if you were to find millions of them, shouldn’t it need any less than mental martial arts professionals who would learn and practice the way of setting traps to those bugs and reporting them to people who would kill ( fix ) the bugs.
Ah! Your skepticism on my initial claims seem to have faded a little. So, you may go through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_software_bugs and let me know how you would have cornered those bugs.
Today, most of the world depends on software and the demand for better software is increasing. How can anyone produce better software?
We believe that people working on software are already smart and I make a conjecture that people have already been thinking to their best of abilities and yet some important bugs are left unfound in many software that is released.
So, if we were to produce better software, we need better thinking.

Will a career in testing suit you? – Part I

I understand that a career in mental martial arts sounds fantastic to those who’d like to keep their brains sharp. I am sure you are curious to know what it means and what would one do in a career like that.
Please be skeptical that I am trying to hype software testing as a mental martial art. When you be skeptical, it allows me to play a mental martial art with you. For instance, you’d think I am hyping software testing and might block yourself to learn what I am trying to say. If I clear the block and then help you learn, doesn’t that sound like a martial arts of brains?
That’s just one. Here is an important idea of mental martial arts in software – Software bugs do not come out on the screen and say, “Hey catch me”. When a product is being developed there could be a million bugs in it. As a tester, I am supposed to catch them and report it to a person who then can kill ( fix ) the bug.
Some bugs are invincible ones, very similar to our Holywood and Bolywood ghost stories that gets multiplied as and when they are killed. How do we kill all of them?

Impact of interviews on decision to join an employer

Geeks preferred challenges. Be it at work or at interview. Geeks would want to work and hang out with other geeks. So, if you are planning to hire a geek and you were to conduct an interview that doesn’t excite the geek then she is likely to not join your organization although you may place an offer.

Some of the geeks to whom I have spoken to feel the same. I had one such experience getting interviewed from Dhanshekaran, Program Director at Mindtree in 2004. Although I could not pass his acid tests, I liked them a lot and wanted to work with him. I was hopeful that the team he has hired would be people who passed through such acid tests and hence would be a nice team to work with.

Fortunately, we met over a weekend geek meet at Bangalore and ever since we are connected and discuss on a variety of topics.

So, poke the geeks with some puzzles and challenges if you were to consider hiring them and to do that you got to have geeks interviewing them.

Hand shake & shivering hands in interviews #1

The first thing that happens in any interview is a hand shake between the candidate and the interviewer. However, is that significant enough topic to think and discuss?

Well, yes, it is. There is a lot to say about hand shake because some people that I have met form their first set of impressions based on the kind of hand shake we offer.

When I was in my teen and when I was introduced to my friend’s dad, I offered a hand shake. Immediately after the hand shake, my friend’s dad asked me, “Are you a confident person?” to which my reply was, “Oh, yes”. He gave a little explanation about how hand shakes matter in business and how self confidence is judged based on a hand shake.

Since then I ensure I offer a firm handshake anyone I meet.  I have seen successful people and have had the opportunity to hand shake with some of them. None of them shook hands the way I did in my teen. So, it matters.

And in the interviews…

Bad Interviewers #2

There are many things that irritates candidates based on interviewer behavior. You might not be surprised that some interviewers keep their mobile phones in ring mode and they ring pretty well, especially during interviews.

It frustrates the candidate and defocuses them from the mission they have to themselves. Some funny interviewers have asked me to answer the question they asked while they were talking to someone on phone. No, I am not an alien – it happened here on Earth.

When I objected to one of the interviewer when he was constantly picking calls – he said he was testing my ability to stay focused despite interruption. I wish I could have said, “How about throwing grenades at me and checking if I stay focus to what you are asking?” but I thought he was an idiot.

“Bad interviewers lose their credibility when they answer a mobile phone call during interview”

Who are you?

Bad interviewers #1

My cousin fought a tough battle to get me an interview opportunity at the CMMi Level 5 company that she was working for for an opening of Senior Tester.

The person sent to interview me was someone who had never tested multimedia products and yet asked a blooper!

BI: “How do you do load testing for a media player application on a mobile phone?”

Me: I don’t know. I haven’t done load testing nor have heard anyone in the organization I work for talk about it. So, I doubt if load testing makes sense.

BI: What, you don’t know Load Runner?

Me: Oh my God! Load Runner on a mobile phone?

Well, this is what happens when you as an interviewer try to be smart when you are not. No one can acquire all knowledge of the world but one can acknowledge what they don’t know.

I would have appreciated if he had said, “I too don’t know but asked you this question to learn something from it”. Load Runner as you know does not run on a mobile phone nor is it targeted to.

Bad interviewers fail to acknowledge the fact that they don’t know something that they are asking.

Who are you?

Are Software Testers Testing their own CV / Profile / Resume – Part 3

Extras and tactical advantage

You could impress the interviewers by testing a web application or an open source project and attaching your test report with it. This gives you a tactical advantage over all other people attending interviews as the interviewers get to see how you can actually test, how you report problems, how you investigate problems, how you can prepare a test report, how good is your writing skills and all that.

Peer Review of your Resume

You might be knowing the value of peer reviews in software engineering. How about bringing that to resume writing? Ask any of your friend’s or peers to review your profile and spot problems. As you are the developer, it is likely that you will make mistakes and you might be blind at spotting them.

Progress Report Reference:

I have been compiling my Progress Reports over the last few years and I want you to have a look at it. Search for Progress Report of Pradeep Soundararajan and you will find the PDF files.

Are Software Testers Testing their own CV / Profile / Resume – Part 2

Projects

This is a very interesting part. Recently, I was interviewing a tester who had a 7 page resume for a 2 year experience. He had detailed out his project on his resume and that’s a bad idea. I helped him understand that it was a bad idea and he went ahead arguing with me that he had to mention all details. A question that I asked him was, “How many pages should Hon Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have?”

I hope you understand why I asked him that question and also hope you won’t make the mistake. You must note that people who might be looking into your profile might already know about the product or project and don’t need super fine details of your project. You can make it to one or two sentences. This gives you a tactical advantage in interviews if you were to explain your project.

Your contribution

It is another common bias to show whatever little stuff you did in the organization as a great one. Again, people are tired of listening to such stuff. You might want to consider elaborating an experience or the challenges you faced and how you fared in it.

For example: When I was a rookie Test Manager, people reporting to me found it hard to digest the fact that I was much younger than them. I had to fight through their ego battle and yet get work done from them. I learnt a lot about managing people, especially when they dont want to listen to you.

Lessons learnt

You could consider jotting down some very quick points of the lessons you learnt from each of the project you worked and that could be an attractive thing for the interviewer. You may consider listing your failures as well although you think listing your failure could cause you lose an opportunity to get an offer. Come on, the whole world understands that every human is fallible and everyone has failed in their life more than a dozen times.

Documentation Guidelines & Crispness

You wont be given a job because your profile looks amazing and it is a booklet of 30 pages of your achievements. So, it means you have to work in an interview to crack the puzzle of getting a job offer from them.

I received one of the worst resume from a software tester who mentioned that he has excellent documentation skills and the word documentation spelling was incorrect. Are you dumb to call him for an interview?

You do not need to search for resume template and fill in because that is a clerical work and I hope you don’t want to be a clerk. Clerical type software testers get clerical pay and they are happy with it as well.

What can wrong in an interview? #1

“Can you tell us any recent critical bug you found in your current project?”

That is a most common question for a software tester and the typical response from a tester is to reveal a bug that he found in a product she has been testing.

Some of us were waiting for that moment to show off ourselves as best testers and reveal the bugs we found a day before coming to the interview.

Is that wrong?

What if you are attending an interview in a competitor product organization and they are interviewing you to know what bugs are there in their competitor product?

You may be letting down your current employer. Some people ask the question to see how faithful you are to your employer and reject you if you reveal confidential information such as bugs.

Have you heard of a story where Microsoft fired a tester because he published the bugs he found on XBox he was testing on his blog? ( Sssh! Google it out )

You can answer such a question by mentioning that you are bounded by an Non Disclosure Agreement that doesn’t permit you to talk about the bugs you found in your projects but can demonstrate bug finding skill by testing a product.