It’s Not Just A Job, It’s A Lifestyle

For your consideration: The Benefits of Pissing People Off.

Although the author is talking about leadership and building, not QA specifically.

In QA, you cannot ultimately do your job without pissing people off.  Granted, you can get a job in QA and hold onto it for a good long time with a get-along attitude, but you’re probably not helping to release software of any better quality than if they didn’t have you sucking up a salary.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 1:45 pm by The Director and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “It’s Not Just A Job, It’s A Lifestyle”

  1. strazzerj Says:
    November 27th, 2009 at 4:07 pm

    “In QA, you cannot ultimately do your job without pissing people off. ”

    Nonsense.

    Being observant, pointing out errors, working with others to produce the best software you can – all of these can be done without pissing people off.

    I understand the slant of your fine blog, and it’s all good fun. But when you are wrong, you are wrong big time.

  2. The Director Says:
    November 30th, 2009 at 10:00 am

    Come on, Joe, I realize it’s the holiday season, but can you let go the tidings for your fellow man here? I mean, we’re talking about IT professionals, after all, not the unsullied man on the street.

    I don’t know what kind of environment you’re in, but I find your implied assertion that you never piss anyone off to be dubious. Come now, no developer ever got miffed at being caught trying to take a shortcut? No project manager ever got peeved when you pushed a release date back to fix a couple more high priority bugs? No one ever got cheesed off at QA for not finding a specific problem that person created?

    It’s going to happen. QA needs to accept, yea, even embrace the fact that we’re not going to be the most popular person sitting at the conference table.

    I’m not advocating pissing people off just to piss them off, but when it happens, I’m not apologetic about it.

  3. strazzerj Says:
    December 1st, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    We can agree to disagree on this one.

    See – we *can* disagree without pissing each other off!

    -joe

  4. The Director Says:
    December 1st, 2009 at 5:00 pm

    We just disagree.

    You’ve not said whether you’ve pissed someone off or not. I say you can try, but you have to sometime.

    Whether you want to admit it publicly or not.

  5. strazzerj Says:
    December 2nd, 2009 at 8:21 am

    I can do my job without pissing people off.

  6. The Director Says:
    December 2nd, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    I’d ask if there were any job openings there in Utopia, but I don’t think I’d fit in.

  7. strazzerj Says:
    December 2nd, 2009 at 1:17 pm

    LOL! I don’t know this Utopia you speak of.