Plight of the QA
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So why do QA folks design release logos?
I started my career in QA a little over 3 years ago. It was
called an SDET. I vaguely confused it with being a ninja JEDI. I was wrong.
I did not like data. I memorized the bubble sort only
because it vaguely reminded me of bubble wrap, and well, that used to be fun. I
was an avid writer in school, right up till I had to write my competitive
entrance exams with half a million other hopefuls. I was definitely not a geek.
I made a sincere effort to be one though. I bought the glasses and one of those
teach me quick tricks on hacking books that I thought would make me seem cool.
It didn’t, and as with time I would realize, nor would this job.
I was stuck in a vacuum trying to decide what the first stop
on a hopefully memorable career would be back in the sweaty summer of 2008. I
had landed a cushy job that would pay more than I could have ever imagined (It
didn’t, tax laws made sure of that). I started out into the unknown and as with
an exotic dish that you try out, I slowly realized that this was not worth
going through again.
So, I realized that this was wrong and was possibly a bad
career move. I saw no future and an MBA was still some time away. I was being
made to work on things that I felt a natural sense of detachment towards. A
feeling bordering on apathy and antipathy overcame me as I went to work
everyday. In my case, I can always blame the great depression of 2008-09 on my
decision to stick it out in the field of QA. However, the reality is quite
different. I would have stuck around even if Goldman Sachs and the rest of the
Wall Street not indulged in the big short (tip of the hat Michael Lewis). The
inertia was too great. I could do things that I normally would not have had a
chance to do with a job that would consume me. I would have the chance to
cultivate a passion. I could always be on the lookout for something amazing!
After 6 months at work and one-word texts to my then
room-mates that only spelt A-L-C-O-H-O-L, I was pretty much in no mans land.
The work would never get me to where I wanted to be, especially since I did not
know where my destination was. There was so much room for innovation that you
showing up everyday was a mark of how the industry was looking up. The work was
pretty easy and most of it dealt with your ability to be a right royal prick. I
was a natural fit.
Yesterday on the Caltrain, I overheard an anecdote about the
QA director coming into a room full of new recruits and saying “So you all want
to be somewhere else but are stuck in QA?” I thought it was a remarkably honest
appraisal of what some people thought when they got into QA. I personally loved
it till I lost a sense of purpose (which was attenuated to begin with). I think
I would have stayed had it not been for the Brownian movement that I feel my
life inevitably is destined for.
So, why do the QA design release logos? Or do things that
are not even tangentially relevant to the hard programmatic problem at hand?
Because they need to express. So much of the identity of a
QA is linked to what someone else made out of (Dev) what someone else wrote
(PM). Let them express. Let them paint, write poems or throw darts at every bug
that gets reactivated. Let them generally hang around and do their own thing.
It is not why they do it but it is how they have contained themselves for so
long.
Qualcomm and Big Data
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Qualcomm stole a march on most of the hyperbole by unveiling the Gimbal. This SDK will make it easy to talk to every possible sensor and as Robert Scoble argues, will push us further to the contextual age. No more atomic transactions or context switches, try fluidity on for size.
The sensors may mean a host of things. From being a standalone to being context aware is a huge paradigm shift but I am not sure if this is the inflection point that we have long been rooting for. All this implies, at least in the medium term is that there is going to be an even bigger explosion of Big Data. Big Data is about to become huge and it will be fueled by consumers. Throwing darts in the dark will actually have more information on the game just by your random hits and misses. So whether or not this is the age of context or not, the winners at least for now look poised to survive based on their ability to promise the extraction of wealth from the sheer explosion of data that we find everywhere.
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