QA Hates You

A posting on craigslist in the Software Jobs section:

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This is a quality assurance for manufacturing, not software quality assurance, but one wonders if the recruiter knows the difference or cares as long as he or she gets a warm body and the percentage off the top.  Manufacturing quality deals mostly with established processes and procedures designed to help manufacturing large numbers of the same things day in and day out.  SQA, as you know, deals with a single SNAFU evolving over a long period of time using unproven technologies wielded by hubris-riven kids out of a four year program in learning Visual Basic.

Some of the skills can transfer over in the abstract, I’m sure, but I canceled my ASQ membership because it was so manufacturing and pharmaceutical intense and I did not get much insight I could apply to SQA except maybe some terminiology to impress my boss and to throw around statistically-based meetings, if I cared to throw them.

To do an SQA job effectively, you’ve got to be rat-mean and weasel-devious to figure out how to go outside the lines that the business analysts and developers have drawn.  You’ve got to suss out crazy alternative workflows and incomplete paths and intermediate states to try to grab as many of a practically infinite number of points of failure.  It’s a little different from looking at a graph and thinking, “Hmm, maybe we should lubricate the punch press every 16 hours.”

Also, when contacting the recruiter, remember not to call their contractors “Kelly Girls.”  That violates their trademark, which instead of being violated is mostly forgotten in the 21st century.  Way to protect a trademark!

Jr Software Tester, if you can get away with it:

Description:
*Maintenance of the environments for the SE system test systems. *Execution of testing processes prior to live deployment. *Interaction with other organizations to get sufficient support from the instructions for PM, Planning and Validation team and all others necessary throughout our portion of the testing life cycle. *Oversee and direct workload from US day shift to offshore resources *Defect management and problem resolution for testing errors

Those whacky jobs posted on Craigslist.  When you manage people, it’s like called a management sort of position in most places.  Perhaps this job poster doesn’t equate furriners as people.

If it’s the philosophy of the hiring firm to indeed have someone come in off of the street and manage the offshore team, perhaps the job heading should be more appropriately titled Scapegoat wanted! with a description Make slightly more than you would managing a gas station, but with more ulcers.