IT Werkz Sometimes

I just had a call from an agent about a position with a testing company who only take on the creme-de-la-creme, well that’s what the agent liked to think. The agent sent me the job spec and said he’d phone later and ask me what percentage fit I thought I would be with the company.

The job spec came through and appeared OK. The agent phoned later and asked me what I thought so I told him it appeared to fit with what I do. The agent didn’t like that answer and responded that I’d failed him and he was disappointed. The agent then said ‘do you remember the question I asked you on our previous phone conversation?’. He actually wanted a percentage figure for the me and company fit. ‘OK 80%’. 

The agent then went on to mention a team leader position, which wasn’t mentioned on the job spec, and which position did I think I would prefer. I responded ‘either’. The agent pushed and I said the team leader position as I was likely to gravitate to that position. He then said that ‘the job spec is specifically for a technical tester why do you want to do the team leader position?. Because he had widened the scope of the positions available and wanted an answer to that question.  Talk about bloody minded and arguementative. The agent then said ‘you are obviously leaning towards a management position and aren’t really a hands-on tester’. Give me strength. Hands-on testing is virtually all that is on my resume, and 18 years of it. But no he was having none of it I was a manager and that was that. He also said he didn’t like the way the conversation was going (HE didn’t? Ed).

Last week I was accused of being a developer and this week a manager. Earlier I had mentioned to the agent that some people get a bit intimidated by my experience and to bear that in mind. I was trying to be helpful but he didn’t like how that sounded and it was obvious that the whole application was going to fail and looking back I think that was the agent’s aim.

The agent received my resume and I suppose had to consider it as I had all the right experience. Just too much of it, and he was trying to get me out of the picture because that very experience was just too much for the creme-de-la-creme company. So he got rid of me by saying that I was a manager. Tiresome little man. I think I remember I had a conversation about that same company a year or two ago with a similar result.

I removed a few other bits and pieces from this blog and have got the load time down to just under 2 seconds and that’s probably as fast as I’m going to get the page to load.

Got to level 60 in WoW.

I’ve lost some confidence in iTunes’s ability at managing music as it appears to be deleting some of it. No doubt it’s got something to do with DRM so I’ve decided to convert everything to mp3 and triple back that up.

I bet Apple have told the music business all kinds of stuff to put their corporate minds at ease. ‘Don’t worry with iTunes we can manage everyone’s music, including getting rid of everything we aren’t sure should be on iTunes’. It is a bit worrying, how do I know what the iTunes and Apple’s services are doing? iTunes may not be running but there is the Apple Mobile Device service and also the iPod service which are both started automatically when the PC is started. How much information is being sent back to Apple about the music I have and also what Apple thinks I ought to have. Or, is it just a too many files problem? I have in excess of 37,000 songs, podcasts and lord know what else in iTunes and maybe that’s just too much.

Also whilst I’m pointing a finger at dastardly companies accumulating data about me, how do I know what data Windows is sending back to Microsoft to be stored on some buggy database somewhere ready to be unleashed and pointed somewhere where I don’t want it sent at some point in the future?

I’m completely stuck at level 56 in WoW, can’t find any quests I can finish. Do I have to grind away till I get to 58 and can go to Outland or do I just stop?

There are now about 18 people at our Scrum meetings and that’s just too many. I thought the idea was to have about 7 or 8 people.

It’s so obvious that we are in pain due to the complete lack of documentation on our very Agile project. There are only two people who know how the system works and they both think in different flavors. Needless to say confusion abounds, but unbeliveably we are making progress. Though it’s not helped that the developers are running the show and they do exactly what they like. They have their development environment, the users have a UAT environment and it seems everybody, including that guy walking by the office right now, has access to our system test environment. What this means is that anybody can do anything to it, and do. We have background workflow processes being switched on and off like billy-oh, everybody uses everyone elses test data and mash that up with the assorted (mis)understandings on how the system is supposed to work and you have chaos.

Oddly enough a lot of them have never known any other way of working. They don’t mind some people attempting to put some order in this anarchy, but there is only so far they will go. I suggested dividing up the test data so we would all have our own batches of data, which would have been very easy to implement but they definitely didn’t like the idea of that. That was far too organised.

Apart from the test environment being an everyman for himself kinda place, the code is flakey beyond belief. What works one minute may not the next. The developers say let us know and we’ll have a look at it. I’ve tried that a couple of times and I get the predictable mumbo-jumbo about all the great reasons why that bit of functionality doesn’t work, right now, but will real soon. This has been going on for weeks.

I think I might start raising loads of defects on all of these ‘features’. No doubt they’ll be a quick fix to get the bugs closed and keep the statistics looking OK. What about if they clear the bug, I prove it works OK and let them know that it will be staying open until I haven’t seen the bug again for a month, just in case a rogue build reintroduces it. That should concentrate their minds a bit.

Am downloading the latest large patch from WoW, which is gonna take another couple of hours, hence this post. Have got to level 33.

Song title:

‘If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me’ Jimmy Buffet