The last time I wrote about Quality Engineering, I mentioned that some of the reasons why people are not familiar with this term are, in no particular order: 'Quality' is usually something that is added as an after thought and doesn't really come into the picture, if ever, until the very end of the release process Nobody outside of a QA team really knows what they do. It has something to do with testing.

Whenever I meet someone for the first time, after we get past the initial niceties typically involved when you meet someone for the first time, eventually the conversation shifts to work and what one does for a living. Inevitably I'm faced with what, at a first glance, may sound like a simple question and the conversation goes like this: New acquaintance: "What do you do at Red Hat?" Me: "I manage a team of quality engineers for a couple of different products.

Making a quick pit stop to mark this milestone in my professional career: today is my 3-year anniversary at Red Hat! Time has certainly flown by and I really cannot believe that it has been three years since I joined this company. I know it is sort of cliche to say "I can not believe that it has been this long..." and so on and so forth, but it is so true.

Kinda scary when you can relate your job to a movie: BOB SLYDELL Y’see, what we’re trying to do here, we’re just trying to get a feel for how people spend their day. So, if you would, would you just walk us through a typical day for you? PETER Yeah. BOB SLYDELL Great. PETER Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way Lumbergh can’t see me.

Today all consultants working for my current employer received the email below (contents changed to protect the innocents): As the old-timers among you know, I periodically ask the IT consultants the gross annual or hourly pay you receive from your respective consultant firm. This information helps us determine the salary range and level of equity among the consultants of each work type/skill set; check that the consultant firm margins are somewhat reasonable, etc.

What does it mean when your direct supervisor keeps asking you to do some of his tasks and you know for a fact there’s no promotion involved? I guess my biggest “beef” is the type of stuff he asks me to write about: What is .NET and what advantages does it offer? What are the advantages of using Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS)? What are the requirements for working on the code library we just purchased and have no documentation on?

While typing my last post I was interrupted by a so-called “.Net Developer who just earned his PMP.” He’s been “featured” here before for asking “very intelligent questions.” =) This time he told me he had just bundled some application and given to a DBA to run it when they received an error message: Oracle[blah blah blah].dll not found!!! "So this program you wrote is trying to connect to an Oracle database?