Panel Discussion: Career planning and progression for QAs in the NZ tech sector
Transcripts
Panel Discussion: Career Planning and Progression for QAs in the NZ Tech Sector.
Panellist: Ramia Saidawi, Pete Savage, Ivan Karaman.
Facilitator: Camy Bhandari.
Camy Bhandari: All right! So we're going to kick off now.
Ivan Karaman: Wait, wait, wait.
Before we begin, before we begin, there is something very important that we need to do. Do you know what it is?
Camy Bhandari: No, but I'm concerned.
Ivan Karaman: I know. It's a duck.
Here we go...
Camy Bhandari: Oh, wow.
Ivan Karaman: Now, it's going to go great, right?
Camy Bhandari: Thank you, Ivan!
All right. So, audience Q&A, we are going to have the last 10 to 15 minutes dedicated to the audience Q&A. If you haven't installed Discord on your phone, now is your chance so you can scan the QR code. There is a channel that is called literally #panel-discussion, so it shouldn't be hard to miss. And you can put all your relevant and spicy questions for our panelists in there.
Okay. So let me start introducing you all to our esteemed panelists. Pete, Pete is up first. Pete Savage. Pete, you have 40 years of experience in tech and 25 years in testing. If I started naming all the companies and job titles that you have worked at, it will take me probably five minutes so I'm going to let you tell us a little bit more about what you've been up to, last 10, 15 or maybe 40 years.
Pete Savage: Okay. I wasn't ready for that. I'd have to look at my CV to remember what I've done over the years, but I was in the UK for many, many years. I started as a developers. Until recently, I thought of myself as a failed developer, so, thanks, Ryan, for putting that straight. I went into testing in 96 and Y2K and I started looking at test management and I came into the beautiful New Zealand in 2014 and I've been here ever since. I've done consultancy firms and contracting, so a little bit of everything.
Camy Bhandari: Thank you, Pete. Did you tell us about Resourecefully? Pete is founder of Resourecefully. You can catch up with Pete later on, if you wanna know about how Resourecefully works and how you can collaborate with Resourcefully.
Next up is my very dear friend, Ramia, who, I've known for at least half a decade now. I met Ramia first at BNZ and since then we've started the BNZ Testing Guild. We've started several other community of practices. We've won hearts and arguments over in several meetings, together, both of us.
So Ramia, tell us a little bit more about your career and how you entered in tech and what you've been up to.
Ramia Saidawi: Yep. Marḥaba, Salam, Kia ora, Hi, everyone. I am originally from Syria. I came here in 2014. And I actually continued my journey in IT when I arrived, here, in New Zealand. My first automation testing job was either 2005 or 2004, back home. And that was outsourcing for a U.S. Company doing semiconductor manufacturing application. So, doing that and then having to take a 10 year gap for my kids, coming to New Zealand, I found the opportunity to come into IT. I did several roles and I think my direction is mostly technical, but I started from testing to senior testing to leading testing and later, I worked more into infrastructure building and design, and I hope I can talk to you about that kind of curated direction.
Camy Bhandari: Thank you, Ramia!
Ivan, you're a man who wears many hats. So, I met Ivan online, from my days when I used to be a baby YouTuber and Ivan was also creating YouTube videos in the Quality space and his videos were far better than mine. I wanted to learn content creation on YouTube from him. Since then, your career has taken a few turns, right? You used to work for Serko as a Principal QA Engineer and then you decided to leave them. And you've now become a full digital nomad, but Ivan was also named one of the top voices on LinkedIn in the Quality Engineering space. So apart from YouTube content creator, digital nomad, you are also one of the top voice in the Quality space. Great to have you here. Tell us more about what you're up to, nowadays.
Ivan Karaman: Oohh, what an introduction! I used to think my career started forever ago, but sitting here in this panel, I think I'm the youngest one. I started in 2006, which is good, sometimes, to be the youngest one. And as you said, I've done it all. You could say it was manual testing, into automation, into test leadership and now into the digital homeless nomad. So, yeah, that's me. I don't want to bore you. It's not important.
Camy Bhandari: Tell us, you know, about the catsitting you're doing nowadays?
Ivan Karaman: Ah, to minimize cost of living, there is this thing called petsitting, you can sign up and look after other people's pets and live in their house for free.
Camy Bhandari: So, Ivan has gone from being a Principal QA Engineer at Serko to selling your house and to cat sitting.
Ivan Karaman: Homeless engineer, at home.
Camy Bhandari: Nice, lovely. Okay. So, with introductions out of the way, this is our topic and we intentionally chose a topic that is relevant to most of us, given the current job market.
Today's panel discussion is going to be very relevant to the New Zealand tech job market because most of us still are living in New Zealand and looking for our next jobs in New Zealand. Things that we discuss here do apply, if you're looking for jobs outside of New Zealand, for sure. But a lot of this is New Zealand in context.
So, moving on, our first question to our panelist is, what factors should software quality professionals consider when planning their career growth in the NZ tech sector? What makes career planning in the NZ tech sector unique?
Pete, we're going to start with you, because I know you have worked overseas and you have a lot of experience, so, I would love to hear your take on this.
Pete Savage: Thank you. 10 years ago was overseas but I'm going to be a little bit controversial and say everyone seems to be buggering off to Australia at the moment or cat sitting.
So it's not a great market at the moment. I think what's unique about New Zealand to me, is the coffee, the networking, the conversations, talking, getting to know people, that seems to be a very Kiwi sort of thing to do. In the UK, I was a contractor. I was there for many years. There was none of that, sort of networking as such. I don't know what it's like now, but it certainly wasn't when I left. For me, networking is a big part of it.
But I think a really good thing to do and things I'm seeing more and more in New Zealand, is having really honest conversations with your manager, your people lead, and I'm seeing more and more organizations having people leaders. For me, it's having those conversations, having those honest conversations, where do you want to go? Do you want to go up the ladder? What is it like up the ladder to manager? Or do you wanna go into diverse, Product ownership, direct career paths within New Zealand and the tech market. What do you love, what do you want to do? Be honest with yourself and be honest with others. Others are thinking New Zealanders are great at helping other people move their careers to where they want to go.
Camy Bhandari: Ivan, would you like to add anything to that?
Ivan Karaman: I wanted to say that New Zealand market is very small. So, irregard of the time that, right now, is bad timing, but overall, New Zealand is a small country, so the market here is small. So what it means practically to you is, if you go niche, like you were talking about ETL thing, right? How many roles, right now, you would find if you go on seek.co.nz or LinkedIn and search for ETL. Probably 0. Maybe one or two, max. So my point is, it's very dangerous to go niche and niche could be from many perspectives. Niche in your role/title. If you are Test Lead, that's niching in your specialty of what you're doing at work. If you are Insurance domain tester, that's a different niche, right? If you're a test automator in a certain language or framework, that's another niche. The more niche you go, the more risk you expose yourself to.
If I were planning my career, if I were a junior or intermediate QA, I would go into wider generalist range, Jack of all trades, kind of. Because I think locking myself down will be problematic for me in the future.
Ramia Saidawi: Can I disagree with this a bit?
Ivan Karaman: Of course, that's the point of the panel. Yes!
Ramia Saidawi: If you plan your career to be generalist, everyone's using Selenium or everyone's using Playwright right now. Whatever direction or tool or specific UI testing, API testing, whatever. There are some categories already, they are known by a lot of testers. So, if you actually select those, fine, that's awesome, you'll get some jobs. But you'll be competing with others. Having some niche on top of them would give you that specific qualities that some people will go, oh, we never met, for example, a tester who's doing ETL and we do have that capability in the company, so maybe we should hire you.
What niche also gives is that you are someone who can be self learning because, like, obviously, all the other ones are generic and there's, like, a lot of learning for them. But for example, when we try to get someone who knows how to test Kafka, how many did we get? Not a lot. The minute we saw some testers who actually talking about being, you know, specifically testing asynchronous systems, it's very important, you're not testing Kafka itself. You are testing a system that's working asynchronously. If you took this as something you have done, then that is very, a plus for you, that can take you above the normal market. So, niche is good. Maybe don't go, you know, just in that niche and forget everything. You do have to have some experience in a lot of areas. But sometimes, niche actually gets you the job more than the generalist.
Ivan Karaman: Can I reply? Thank you!
You are right. It's a high risk high reward, versus low risk lower reward or bigger competition, kinda situation. So I was giving my advice in more stable life with more predictability. And you saying, yes, you're going to win, probably going to win big, but what if not? That's a danger.
Ramia Saidawi: Yeah. But, you do win to the future, as well.
Ivan Karaman: Of course, of course.
Camy Bhandari: I'm going to hand over the mic to Pete now, because I feel like Pete has a disadvantage, because we're sharing the mic.
Ivan and I should have been sharing the mic.
Pete Savage: Just thinking about the factors, you should. I think we've heard it a few times today, around the value that you bring. I think we don't have that confidence that what we do is valuable. And I think we gotta learn that. In the market right now there might be a job ad you might be interested in going down that career path or whatever it might be. There's 100 people going for that job. So it's really tough market right now. This is talking in the moment rather than career planning. You've got to evaluate yourself and talk in the hiring manager's language. We talked about risk today.
What does testing bring? Looking at that risk, bringing that value. You got to value yourself and stand out and have confidence in what you do because it's a very valuable contribution. It doesn't exist. Testing doesn't exist for the good of its health. It has a huge value. So, talk confidently, talk about value, talk about risk. That will put you way ahead of other people going for that role.
Camy Bhandari: Thank you. I am keen to bring another angle, I'm not sure if we've already discussed that.
New Zealand has a handful of enterprise level companies. We have way more startups and scale ups.
A lot of you, I know, are working for startups and scale ups, or if you're working for big enterprises, you're planning to move to scale ups or start ups because maybe you are just bored working for big corporates or vice versa.
So I'm keen to hear your takes on that. So, if someone is trying to, let's say they've always worked for a large bank and now they are, they are just bored, you know. They've been doing it for 10 years, they want to move to a small company, what factors would they consider? Go on Ivan, very obvious.
Ivan Karaman: I would say, in the beginning of your career, it's probably a better idea for you to go and work for a bigger, established company. Reason is, in the bigger, established companies, they have processes and they solved multiple problems and you are more likely, on average, to learn good practices there. And once you become a little bit of a master of good practices, you could move on to startups or smaller companies and start influencing culture there, influencing quality through your actions.
But if you go to the startup straightaway, you'll be like, argh, I don't know what to do. You might do good, because you're trying to do good. But again, less likely.
Ramia Saidawi: Yeah, I believe going directly to a startup is a bit scary but the other factor that you really need to think of is how you learn. So, for example, startups are really good if the way you learn is by trying. Because you have the freedom to innovate. You get to try new things. You get to try different ways to do things.
No one is telling you, this is how you have to do, you know, bloody follow the process. But if you are someone who'd like to learn from others, from looking at someone else's work, technically, for example, you're starting your automation testing career and you want a framework to be already set up for you and you want to, you know, ease your way into that automation testing world by having someone taking your hand. Then actually finding a company who is well established, has the processes to teach you, would be really good. And especially, a lot of those companies have your best interest. If you're permanent employee, of course, has the best intention to get you upskilled because otherwise, what are they going to do with you, if you don't learn it? So basically it's a win-win in that situation.
Now again, that's talking about, like, you trying to learn. We're not talking about you're now a senior contractor, who's like, oversees a job, here or there, that's a different context. But if you're junior, intermediate, those are your options, really.
Camy Bhandari: I think I'm going to hand over the mic to Pete first, so Ivan you'll have to wait. Because Pete, I'm really keen to hear your take on this, because you are currently head of testing at WestPac. And you have worked in all sizes of companies. You've also co-founded your own company, you're a company founder, so I think you will have lots of insights there.
So Ivan, you'll have to wait. Pete's going first.
Pete Savage: I was going to say, it's very much about being flexible. Adding value. A startup is very different to a large organization, obviously, and you get a lot more support, as you said. I think all organizations really enjoy and want to help people who are also flexible and pragmatic and helping to get to the end goal.
One thing we haven't talked about is consultancies. There's a number of consultancies here today, sponsoring the event. That's great. It's a slightly different proposition in a consultancy. So within a large organization, they'll be a budget. The conversations about reimbursements, about career path. Within a consultancy, it's slightly differently because I want to go to the next level, my next level pays more. In their mind, it's a, how do we get that return on investment, are you sellable at that next level and how much are we going to sell you out for? They're a business essentially.
You've also got to understand what business you're in. With a startup, less money, therefore, you can add more value and be flexible and pragmatic. I think underlying for me is always being adaptable, adding that value and working with the team that you're in.
Ivan Karaman: What I wanted to add it's a sudden flush in my head, that my advice about going into the big company earlier in your career is also a dangerous advice, potentially. You've seen people maybe you know some people who have 10 years of experience and it's not really ten years of experience, it's the same one year, repeated ten times. So, this is something that you could get, theoretically, and probably more likely to happen in a bigger company, where you're just doing your thing for ten years and you're so good at it but you're completely unemployable elsewhere.
So be aware of staying somewhere for too long.
Ramia Saidawi: That would be called "comfort zone." Make sure you don't fall in that comfort zone and you have opportunities to challenge yourself within the company, itself, if you want to. So, like, don't think that I have to quit my company to challenge myself in something. Sometimes you can challenge yourself within the same company, within your role or next team. Yeah, definitely, if you catch yourself in a like, relaxing kind of mode, it's really up to you. If you want to continue your career or you want to relax. And sometimes it might be your option because there's too much happening, going on and that's one of the beauties, I would say, about New Zealand. They give you that break, they actually consider life work balance. But as I said, if you're considering you have a career, not a job, then you probably don't want to be on your comfort zone.
Pete Savage: I would just add that I think moving from different companies to different companies is a great idea. You get different ideas and different experience. From a hiring manager's perspective, if you see people jumping constantly, it's a red flag. So there's got to be a fine line there, somewhere. So just be aware of that, a contractor, three months, three months, three months, possibly a bit of a red flag there.
Ramia Saidawi: Actually, I refused a CV in an interview because I couldn't see a contract that lasted more than four months.
Camy Bhandari: Yeah I believe that's quite an interesting point wrt contracting, because I've been contracting for the last half decade and luckily majority of my contracts have been about a year long, which I prefer anyways. If it's any shorter than a year, financially it's quite a risk for me and it's not stable, and again, it doesn't look good in the CV.
So, moving on to our next question. How can I effectively prepare to secure a role in the current New Zealand tech job market? What strategies have worked for you and which skills should I focus on developing? When I say "I," "I" mean people in the audience. Any one who is trying to look for a job. And when I say the current New Zealand tech market, it's everything that's happening in the current NZ job market: the redundancies, the new government, too many things to recall for me. So, you know...let's start with Ivan this time.
Ivan Karaman: Me again. Good!
I'll start with my personal perspective, as an immigrant. When I was coming to New Zealand, I heard a lot of stories about New Zealand job market and most of them were like, oh, we're searching for job for like, six months, nine months, one year and struggling to find it. And, when I came, I somehow was lucky to find a job, like, straightaway in the first interview. And again, I think I was just lucky that it was a good time and good moment for me and that's not the point. But being lucky is important.
I think I was trying to analyze what got me the job and I think that it was my level of spoken English. I don't know how much of you audience here are immigrants and have, like, strong accent or not know language well enough because you just came recently and you're struggling. But, I think that's one of the undervalued skills, which is essential for us because we are supposed to be the glue between development and business and be good at communicating, and if you cannot explain well what you're doing and why you're doing it, and why we need to be doing something, you're going to struggle in terms of, people will unlikely hire you. So that's just, if you feel like your language is not strong, pay attention to try to be better at communication, like, go to the courses, pay for a speaking coach or something. Right?
Sorry. A few more things. Do you have a comment or I will say a few more things?
Okay. Good!
I think what works in New Zealand is mostly networking. That's probably what I would say, go to meetups, either on meetups, even if it's a developers meetups or conferences like that and actually talk to people. Like, we have a person here, today, wearing an orange tshirt, who came here specifically for networking and hiring people. Very good job placement, sir. You know who you are.
So, a lot of companies in New Zealand will be saying why spending money on, let's say, recruiters, if we can just find a free job board or even better, we can ask our current employees, do you know someone who can fill the role? So, a lot of the time, roles are not even going to the outer market. They appear inside of the company to say, oh, maybe one of the support engineers, customer service people want to convert. And sometimes those roles are filled internally. They don't even go to LinkedIn or Seek. Networking is important because you are signaling people you know that, I'm on the market. I'm looking for a role, for a job, and here's my skills. If you think I'm fitting, maybe mention me to your hiring manager in your company.
Ramia Saidawi: Networking is a good point to start from. So, before COVID, we had, like, this division in the bank where we're building APIs. At that time, there was a new thing. We wanted testers and we, you know, put roles up for testers to apply to and we got a lot of applicants and then going through the interviews. The interviews was very simple. I just put a small swagger about how you create a customer. Create a customer, get a customer, update customer details. And I asked them, can you please give me test cases for this. And you can't imagine some of the answers I got. Like, for example, someone was giving me the positive cases and
I said, awesome. Can you give me some negative test cases and he said, always think positive.
Seriously. I got that answer. Someone else I remember, I was asking, like, what would happen if you call this, you know, this endpoint and there's no customer and she was like, very enthusiastically: Page not found.
I'm talking about API, not UI. So we thought, okay. There's a gap in the market for people to understand what a swagger is, what API testing is. We had problems with testers who don't even know how to use Postman, how to use the authentication mechanisms and stuff like that. So we started a meetup.
And we were like, enthusiastic, we're going to do it. We actually did the first session and we did it half online and in person, and we started with explaining what Swaggers are. Stuff like that. It had, like, a really good echo. People really liked it and attended. We were, like, planning ahead, we're going to do the next session about Postman, next session about API test cases, functional testing, nonfunctional testing for APIs and then COVID comes. And everyone back in their houses. We couldn't do the meetup anymore. We weren't able to start it for quite some time and when we wanted to start it afterwards, everyone was like everywhere else. So it was really hard for us to come back.
So networking's very important but sometimes you cannot get that. You cannot get that because the whole idea was, we will train them and then we'll hire them, but we couldn't do that.
So, what else you can do? Make yourself visible. Start from what you can control, which is you. So you have a GitHub, LinkedIn page, you don't even need a website. Just go and write something of your experience. It doesn't even need to be technical. You could talk about a problem at your work and how you're able to solve it. You know, how you were able to convince the developer that this is a bug, in requirement, in development, it's a bug. So that kind of articles will tell the people who you are. When you come in and interview, which is something we do, we'll look at your LinkedIn. If I see articles and I see you already uploaded automation test examples, I want to ask you, do you know Git? This is the kind of thing that takes you to a different line of interviews, because now I know about what roughly you have. I mean, certificates are good, good to have certificate. But articles tell me more who you are, how you think. It is important in both technical and soft skills. Whatever you can express about yourself. That is the real CV. Not what you ask ChatGPT to write.
Pete Savage: It's your career. Do something about it. LinkedIn is a great place. As a recruiter or a person of hiring, the first thing I do is go and look on LinkedIn. It's just where everybody goes.
We did a meetup group every month and I get guest speakers to talk about things that are relevant. We had someone to come in and talk about how do make your LinkedIn profile stand out. How to make your CV stand out. It was ridiculous. You've got to do something, talking internally, talking to your managers, what do you want to do? The great thing about New Zealand is I can talk to everyone. People will give you a half hour of their time. Take advantage of that. There's not many places in the world that will do that.
Starting Resourecefully, I've talked to a lot of founders here. In the UK, I wouldn't have gotten past the PA. In New Zealand, every founder and CEO has given me at least a half an hour of their time.
Camy Bhandari: I was going to ask Ivan, but it's so much fun to stop him. I was just going to add, content creation is something I started doing probably around when COVID hit. I had reached the same point in my career and I started exploring YouTube. This was before I started organizing conferences. But, that's where I met Ivan and Pato, our speaker. Because they were both already creating YouTube content and online courses, and there are not a lot of people in New Zealand doing that in the quality space. So that's how we connected. All of those beautiful relationships have manifested to us being part of NZTestingConf 2024 today.
Ivan Karaman: I wanted to jump on the train of ideas of standing out and to make a point, with the minimal effort, it's actually not that hard to stand out. Right? But a lot of people, I've been hiring and I've been looking at the CVs of the people. A lot of time, it's an absolute generic, minimal type of thing. I was doing test cases or participated in team meetings and stuff. And I don't know who you are. For me, you just one out of 100 CVs that I get. So would you be invited to the interview? Possibly, yes, if everything else is matching. But also, possibly no. So, if you put a little bit of effort, if you publish an article on LinkedIn and mention it somewhere in your statement, I'm writing a blog. You are already, like, 1 in 100. You're already unique and it's not that hard to do.But surprisingly, a lot of people don't do that, for some reason. And I think more people should.
Pete Savage: So, I'm probably not sure, I'm allowed to say this really. Many years ago, thankfully, you always get lots of people sending their CVs. I've got examples of people copy pasting. They said they lied and copied and pasted, which put them on blacklist. I hired someone once because they did hot air ballooning, because they were interesting. They were an interesting person. In fact, my first ever job interview for a developer in the UK, they asked me if I played pool, I thought, oh, that's it. I haven't gotten the job. I've got a pool table at home. Hired me. Apparently, every Friday, the whole team went and played pool at the pub. You've got to fit in with the team. You've got to be of interest. You're a human being. You're not there just to be generic.
Ramia Saidawi: Something I just wanted to mention that with this market, it's not just that, you know, economically, it's not a very good market and half of the population's going to Australia. But on top of that, we have a lot of companies also outsourcing. So you're talking about a market that is, like, really challenging for you to survive in.
So you really need to, make sure that what you're doing, this career, this gift that you have, which is your analytical skills, above everything else, is actually nurturing and actually getting you some niche. Because you really want to stand out, you need to have the advantage in this very competitive market. So maybe if things were like it was a bit, 5-6 years ago, I would say there's jobs for all levels, but you can see a lot of companies are moving more to people who have skills, especially in contracting. They go, we need the best of the best, otherwise we're not going to get that person. In such a market, it's really your decision, how much you want to push yourself to get to that top. Saying "push," it's not a really a good word because if you don't enjoy it, then you're probably in the wrong industry. So, if I'm actually doing something for learning about AWS, for example, if I'm doing it and not enjoying it, then probably I shouldn't do it.
Doing my work as fun, like they said, that should be something you think of. Otherwise, going from testing to different roles, even within soft software is also available. I'm just saying, like, find your gig, find your fun and keep pushing yourselves, so that you are unique.
So, I tell my daughter, she wanted to do photography. I was like, how can you live on photography and then, like, she said, I like it. I was like, okay. I went and I invested in a $1,000+ camera. If she doesn't use it, we can use it for family photos or something. She used it a bit. She took really good photos with it, but they were normal. There was no spark in them. So, here we had this conversation. You really want to go into photography? You have a journey of loving photography for the sake of photography. You'll feel like you're breathing it. This is how you will lead in that area. Go for it, then you'll make it. But if you're just doing it because, just a little bit of something you have to do here or there, then probably maybe that's just a side hobby, not a career. So, if that's your career, then you really need to enjoy it.
Camy Bhandari: All right. Thank you, Ramia. So, if you are following us on Discord, I will be taking the questions. I'm loving the questions and the commentary on the Discord. So please do send reactions. The questions with most votes will be the ones our panelists will be answering.
So, next question: What is your experience with learning technical and nontechnical skills in your QA career? What skills have helped you the most, as you've progressed through your tech career?
One of the things that I would really appreciate for all three of you, for this question, is to put the hat on, of when you were just entering the tech job market, because we have a lot of people who are starting their careers. And then as you move from junior to intermediate, what helped you then. When you moved from intermediate to senior, what helped you then? Once you reached a senior, what's next? What are you currently working on, because I know all three of you are, like, seniors now, so I would really appreciate that nuance. Who hasn't gone first yet, Ramia? Go on, Ramia!
Ramia Saidawi: You hear, all the time, about technical skills and soft skills. And, I just want to really be honest. I will take soft skills over technical skills any time. Because when you have soft skills, that means you have the intelligence to learn, the intelligence to communicate, the intelligence to actually grow in the technical skills. The opposite is really hard. I might get someone to do something specific because it's too close to the project deadline.
But if we're talking about permanent employee, the most value will come from the soft skills. So even if you're a junior, we run campaigns like Summer of Tech, graduation projects, in the bank, where we get new students who just graduated or about to graduate, to work with us in the bank and then later on, we offer them hopefully a placement. Number one thing, we're looking for and that's a fresh junior, not what they did, not their age. It is important, but that's not what we measure mostly. We're measuring team fit. We're measuring how much they are open and communicating and, like, they have the spark, especially if it is a testing role, like, the number one is curiosity and analytical problem solving. That's the number one of what make a tester a tester. I would say soft skills even before tech.
Ivan Karaman: Can I hijack? I have somewhat different opinion. And, I would say that earlier in your career, hard skills are more important. You just mentioned, in the previous question, that you would ask in the interview, like, what is a swagger and they were like, blaaahhhh. I don't know. That's a hard skill. They don't know and they should. So, did you hire them? Probably not. Because, if you're talking about someone junior, right, they need to be able to do things you told them to do. And you, yes, you could teach the hard skills, it's easier to teach but this is what we're talking about the junior people. It's nice if they have soft skills, right, obviously. But we're talking about unicorns. Sometimes it's hard.
The more you grow in your career, the more soft skills become important. Say, you're a senior or a Test Lead, now you need to influence your whole team. You need to explain to them the importance of doing something, so you need to deeply understand that and be able to verbalize it, so that they understand it, so you need to speak their language. And this is very hard to do. And, young professionals, if they can do that, they're great. But, yeah, as I said, they are probably unicorns.
There is a very famous presentation/YouTube talk called Being Blue by Tania Riley. So, if you haven't seen it, go and Google it and see it. It's it's actually talking about roughly this situation, that if you are junior enough and you're doing a lot of glue work, which is soft skills, you might not be promotable. So you're shooting your own leg and you're damaging yourself in your career. Prove to them that you're technical, that you can write code or do good testing and now you're senior, you can use your soft skills to the bigger degree and scale down on hard skills.
Ramia Saidawi: This is why I wanted a mic. Because, I think what we have in difference here, is the definition of what soft skills is. So, part of soft skills is actually your ability to learn, your ability to adapt, your ability to actually, self motivate. And that doesn't mean especially for juniors, for example, like, we know that they don't know. That's not what we're hiring them for. We're hiring them because we think they are good material and to honest, a lot of those juniors, you can't imagine, they are pillars now in the bank. We really suffer if they want to leave. We can't easily replace them. And they're still young. Actually, sometimes envy them. Because they really managed to get into a really good place at that young age. But the foundation was that they like, you know, one of them had I think, there was, like, in the CV, the skills: Googling. Seriously! That was impressive and when we asked, what they wanted to explain was that they know how to get the information and that's exactly what we wanted. We don't want someone to knock on our door every five minutes and, can you tell me how to do this? Can you tell me how to do this?
Pete Savage: I am a technical luddite. And if I think I am very honest, when I was a developer, I was pretty much a technical luddite. I could code. It was COBOL in Assembly. It wasn't the most exciting code in the world. But I think this is about being honest with yourself and where you want to go. If you're technically good and you enjoy that world, go and do that. Don't go, as we see so often, people who are very, very good, technically, go into management for the money. It's a very different skill set so being very honest with yourself and focus and work on your skills and stay in that realm.
Hey, if you want a little bit more money, it's a little bit more unstable, it's not for everyone. You need to make that decision carefully. But the skills you have, if you enjoy them, stay in that realm. Management and tech and doing are very, very different worlds. So, very much encourage everyone to look at themselves and be honest and work with their strengths. Don't grow a career for the sake you think that's the way.
Ivan Karaman: Just something to add about the management and the career pathways. It's important for you to try it. So, if you're senior career for a few years and you want to be a test lead, dev team lead, something like that, some step in management, yes, you need to realize probably you won't be great at it. But you need to know if you like it or not and something you want to grow into unless you try. It's important for you to try it out and then make decisions based on information if you want to go to senior QA. It could be for you. You don't know unless you try.
Ramia Saidawi: I have actually a question for the audience. So, how many of yourselves consider you an automation tester. How many consider themselves manual tester? Cool. Shouldn't it be everyone, though? Just wait. How many of those manual testers you guys, actually ended up writing an SQL statement to get data, for example? So, the thing that I wanted to say, it is not automation testing. It's using automation in testing.
So, basically, what what is efficiency? Efficiency is if this is your process to do a test case, where in that process you are suffering the most from repeating yourself, doing the same thing, again and again, this is where you need to invest. It doesn't need to have, like, a fancy framework of, you know, protector testing or whatever tools you want. All you need to look at, how I can do this test the fastest with implementing as much as small, easy to maintain scripts and you can call yourself automation tester because actually, it is not about automation or manual. It's about efficiency. It's about test cases so if you found the test cases, the right test cases that find the risk. You know, risk, risk, risk, risk. And if you find the best way to do, an efficient way, then you basically that is the definition of an automation tester.
We had, I think, one of the audience know about that. We had a big UI suite to do a manual testing automation testing for an application that goes from the start to the end. It was covering four cases of, like, a big landing applications. And those four tests fail every time when they release. They were integration testing. And the testers take, like, 3 4 days to fix them to get the release out because they were blocking the pipeline. You know how long it takes for a normal tester on that team to do those tests? Half an hour. Do you think that is, um, you know, worth it? So when you think about yourself, it's not manual or testing, you're efficient. When you can squeeze the process, you hit in and that's back to how you see your value. That's really important.
Camy Bhandari: Thank you. Some really good points there. I'm dying to add my own commentary, but there's only seven minutes left, so I'll save mine.
Audience Q&A. So, there is a really good question here, which is quite relevant to the question we just discussed. So the question is, "In the current software testing industry, I think after you become a senior tester, it's quite difficult to go to the next level and usually, the next level is a Test Manager. What other career paths can we consider?"
I would like Pete to go first.
Pete Savage: Thanks. This is a difficult one. I personally think and I've got lots of people I work with, who I go to, who I know are very good at their thing and they stay in that lane and they want to stay in that lane. If they, if you're doing it for more money, obviously, contracting is a route. Yeah, I don't think there's anything really you need to do. If that's your bag, that's what you're liking, that's your place of comfort and you're good at it, keep doing that.
Ivan Karaman: I'll chip in, as someone who actually managed to break the ceiling somehow.
I had a Principal QA engineering role, this was across the organization, improve things, good luck. And, these roles exist and they starting to appear slowly if you are following the bigger tech companies, with a lot of employees. They have Staff roles and Principal roles and sometimes other fancy name roles. These things exist, so it is possible for individual contributor/hands on/technical route beyond the senior QA. It's rare, and again, New Zealand being a small market, it's rarer here. But it's possible.
You also have option to go into management, obviously, and this could be management of team, Team Lead potentially, because, why not? It's not a test manager role, which is probably a dying role. And also, you have option of lateral moves, right? Career doesn't go up and down all the time, because money's not everything in life. It's important, but not everything.
Oooh, five minutes left. You could maybe transition to product. We had a speaker today who was a developer and then transitioned into product. Whatever rings your bell, whatever brings you fun, maybe consulting, that's a lot of high pay, different projects, more challenging. Permanent roles, I know everything in my job place and I'm comfortable. Choice is yours, they're all options.
Ramia Saidawi: Thank you for leaving two minutes.
Camy Bhandari: We have five minutes and I'm really dying to hear Ramia's take on this.
Ramia Saidawi: Number one, value. Yes, as they said, analytical mind and the ability to, you know, to solve problems. But actually, number one asset that you have within any company that you've worked for more than six months or a year in, is that you are the only one who knows this system. Tell me any other person in the bank, any other role in the bank that would know the system, from A to Z, technical and business both. None. You are the only one, because you can talk to the business about their requirement and you can talk to the developers about their code, and you can go to logs and see what's happening. You can go to database and see your data. You're actually the one that know the system. What does that mean? That means you can go from there to anywhere in the bank, in whatever company you're working at, because now you actually hold all that different knowledge set.
So don't underestimate that value, that's the core value. It's not the technical skills. As I said, they come as you need them. And to be honest, there's a career, if you know the system. So for example, in my case, I started from being a tester and leading testing and helping testers onboard, blah, blah, blah, but then I knew the system, so now I'm designing the system. I'm designing the infrastructure for IBM MQ on AWS on-prem, with the security, with the infrastructure that avoids the problems that we have right now. Because I understand it, I've been there, I've been testing, I saw the faults, I saw the issue. I know from the developing cycle to the infrastructure, how that works. You have a career of even being an architect, not only being technical.
Pete Savage: Just reiterate again, talk to someone either internally. Let's do it with a show of hands. Who, here, has got someone they can talk to, honestly, about their career and can get some help? Which is great. Do you do it? I don't know. But if you haven't, find someone. Talk to them. Internally, if you're comfortable. Talk to your manager, if you're comfortable. It's your career. Find the advice and help from others who maybe have been there before and can help.
Camy Bhandari: Can I just add, this is why we organize conferences with after parties. If you don't have a mentor, join us at after party and find a mentor.
And, I think that is it. That was a great panel discussion. Thank you, all panelists. Thank you for the amazing questions and the all the spicy commentary on Discord channel. That was very entertaining. Thank you All.