Secrets of an IT career that are better not to talk about…
…but which QA lead “ITQ Group” Sergey Murashov shared with us.
A long time ago, when the grass was green and the country was not full of advertisements for IT courses, the profession of a tester was not yet the very thread that a person without superpowers could cling to in order to get into the world of IT. It was then that the author of this article began his QA journey.
And if he, the present one, went back 10 years into the past and told himself about the situation in the IT market and the professional path he had taken, then the young tester would twirl his finger at his temple and doubtfully say: “No, uncle, it’s not like that.” It happens”.
But in reality it happens. I wrote this article to help those who are just starting their journey in IT as a QA. In it, I tried to explain, using simple examples, how to make it easier for yourself to enter the profession, what you need to pay attention to so that your expectations from immersion in the world of IT coincide with reality.
Features of primary selection in IT then and now
Good old days
I still remember getting hired for my first job. Having received my diploma, I could not immediately figure out where to go with it. I called a classmate with whom I celebrated graduation from university a week ago and asked who he worked for. It turned out that he was a tester. I received advice from him: how to write a resume and what to study for this position. I posted my CV the very next day and, not counting on immediate success, went off to do other things. Imagine my surprise when the very first call on the same day turned out to be an invitation to an interview. No foreplay, tests or other rituals.
I didn’t have time to study testing theory properly, so I printed out the material from Wiki and frantically tried to remember everything I could on the way to the meeting. Result: a successful interview and an offer that I immediately accepted.
A dizzying three-day success story that began with a simple thought: “why not try.”
You may object. To say that I was just lucky: the employer was urgently looking for a person and lowered the requirements for the candidate. The stars just aligned. This really could happen.
But let's return to current realities and ask ourselves: would a university graduate with zero experience, having memorized only an elementary theoretical base two hours before the interview, get a job so quickly?
Of course not.
New times are not so kind anymore
The massive Covid quarantine has led to the popular IT sector beginning to inflate like a bubble. New customers have appeared on the market, ready to open their pockets to intermediary companies (integrators), who, in turn, are in a hurry to use the budget. The situation is heated by advertisements for courses that promised (and continue to do so) impressive salaries for a beginner. It's a bull market in the flesh.
As you know, all bubbles burst, and pendulums swing in both directions. And after February 2022, the pendulum swung too much.
The result was an outflow of customers or their complete withdrawal from the market, many specialists lost their jobs, and some suddenly began to speak the official language of Cyprus. The market contracted.
Now let’s add to this the second point, which follows from the first – high requirements for the qualifications of juniors. When you have, at best, a competition of a couple of people for one place, you will not be too selective when evaluating a candidate. And if there are at least a dozen such applicants, you won’t stand on ceremony. You will select the best of the best, simultaneously arranging a “battle royale” for them.
A tearful HR girl runs up to her boss and starts complaining:
– Ivan Vasilyevich, what should I do? One vacancy received 300 resumes. I won't have time to see them all.
The boss calmly takes a huge pile of sheets from the girl’s hands, selects the top 10, and throws the rest into the trash bin.
– Ivan Vasilyevich, what are you doing? – she screams in horror. – I haven’t looked at them yet
Looking at HR in surprise, the boss asked: “Why do I need losers in my thriving company?”
The reason for the high competition was a huge influx of juniors without obvious experience, but with the baggage of those same IT courses.
The situation turned out to be truly strange. The pendulum swung towards a contraction of the market, and the hysteria around the transition to the IT world remained on the other side. To the huge number of specialists of various qualifications, people who decided to change their profession were added.
This is not surprising. If a certain Petya meets his friend Vasya, who says that he earns three times more than him, sitting at the monitor and pointing out other people’s mistakes, then Petya will watch videos about how much people can earn in the testing industry, and then quickly sign up for a course.
This is where the fun begins – natural selection.
Once I had to look through about three dozen resumes for a QA vacancy in a couple of months. Less than 10% of them were CVs of specialists who graduated from a technical university.
I don’t think that people who decided to move to IT from other fields of activity are any worse. On the contrary, they are worthy of admiration: they have to start in an obviously losing situation compared to those who initially chose to develop in the field of information technology.
But these statistics demonstrate the situation on the labor market. On the one hand, there is an employer who needs a smart and cheap specialist, but instead they give him anyone other than IT specialists. On the other hand, Petya, who sees Vasya’s salary, sees the prices in the store, counts the time and money spent on the courses, and asks for a six-figure salary.
It turns out like a joke about two extraordinary personalities who decided to play cities: Moscow – Amsterdam, Moscow – Amsterdam, Moscow – Amsterdam…
How to get an offer by working with a resume and self-presentation
I return to the secrets of the profession. If you have made your resume as a carbon copy, writing something like “I know Rest and Soap api, I know microservices, test design techniques, sql and other things,” keep in mind that your CV will most likely end up in the trash.
It’s another matter if in the “Desired salary” column you have an amount less than that of your competitors. The chances will increase significantly. But you and I want to get a decent offer, right?
When it comes to selecting candidates, everything is simple. When a person is told: “choose only 3 out of 10 resumes,” the selection process will be something like this:
Vasya wrote that he knows the Rest API and microservices.
Petya wrote that he also knows SQL.
And Olesya wrote that, in addition to the above, she also knows how to work with sniffers.
In a natural way, we choose the winner – Olesya, and send the two losers home. But this doesn't always work.
Adding personality to your resume
I had to deal with carbon-copy resumes. This is especially noticeable when you have to review several people supplied by one vendor (in this case, an intermediary company providing testers).
It looks as if people ran a request for a resume through a neural network, and then, without spending a minute checking it, passed off the result as their CV.
I myself will definitely pay attention to a person if in the “About Me” column I find, for example, so-called pet projects that are publicly posted on gitlab or github. Or if the candidate names channels or books, even if I haven’t heard of them.
Even if a future tester does some kind of jiu-jitsu or pencak silat, I will be more willing to talk to him than to someone who has the standard “Always dreamed, always wanted.”
The presence of such points does not at all guarantee that a person is smart and quick-witted or that he will be able to “punch it out of the park” on a call to an insolent customer (even if only metaphorically).
This indicates that the candidate is interested in his own development, is not afraid to try something new and is results-oriented. Or… He quickly changes interests and priorities. However, such an applicant will want to be called for an interview more than just another tracing paper.
We embellish knowledge to get a position or develop soft-skills
90% of the success of receiving an offer will depend on how well you perform in the interview.
Throughout my life, I have been lucky enough to attend many interviews. I was also an interviewer at real and mock meetings to train employees, interviewed candidates for real projects, and myself “made forays into the enemy camp” to the customer.
And if you choose one single quality that an applicant should have in his arsenal, then this is window dressing. Or, to choose a more appropriate word, presentability.
If you consider yourself a technically savvy and worthy candidate for a QA position, but at the same time you don’t know how to present yourself: you are lost, worried and generally feel terrible discomfort, you will have to be disappointed. Rather, you will give up the vacancy to a person who is less professionally developed, but is able to demonstrate confidence and high communication skills. He may not know how to work with some tools, have large gaps, but at the same time he will be able to disguise it.
The reason for such blatant injustice is in the conclusions that are necessarily present in the interviewer’s head:
“Being silent means he doesn’t know.”
“If he speaks with uncertainty, he is not confident in his knowledge.”
“If he doesn’t know how to conduct a dialogue, there will be problems communicating with the team and outside of it.”
The list goes on.
Actually, such an interviewer would be right. The time has long passed when a tester was only required to poke buttons and silently write reports.
So-called soft skills are the most formidable weapon. You can use them to cover yourself in case of your own punctures (not always), and protect your labor costs (again, not always). And in general, get a pretty good buff in your work.
Unlike the developer profession, you are unlikely to be asked to do graph traversal or write program code in an interview. In most cases, everything will be limited to writing an SQL query and tasks like “Test the authorization window.” Although in fairness, I note that we are talking specifically about manual testing.
Of course, a person who only knows how to talk beautifully about non-existent skills will be seen through quite quickly and then shown the door. Interviews are conducted by far from fools, and if you get too carried away with the role of storyteller, you will be brought down to earth with a series of leading questions.
In addition, the skill of persuasion among such “storytellers” is taken not from information read or snatched somewhere, but from real experience – their own or someone else’s, but well studied.
The candidate can lie that he has testing experience by inventing a suitable cover story. And here, it would seem, you want to cry out in your hearts: “what a bastard.” But what can you say if a person has previously taken courses and over the past six months has trained himself in such a way that he will give a head start to almost any old-timer who has sat in a comfortable place?
Finally, firing someone is not that easy. If the employee is adequate and ready to grow, then turning him into a tester with real experience will not be difficult. Unlike a developer or automation specialist, where writing code and having practice is a must, the threshold for a tester is much lower. Mandatory skills include a head on your shoulders and straight arms growing from the right places. I will add that the ability to ask the right questions is valued more than just the ability to work well and remain silent. This is especially important for large banking projects, where communication is the most important thing.
So what advice can you give a candidate before an interview? In fact, everything is the same as for another profession.
First. Be confident and not doubt. Even in things that you are not very good at. Doubt is ruin.
Second. Most people do not have deep knowledge. Exactly deep. Yes, they will notice a gap in basic things, such as the difference between smoke and regression or a monolith and microservices. But if you start talking, for example, about the REST API beyond the work of HTTP methods, code statuses and other standard set of questions, where you slightly touch on aspects of the operation of the application server, go into development territory, tell us about the true essence of the occurrence of exceptions, then have no doubt – the interviewer in most cases will take your word for it. Even if you confuse some individual moments and aspects, they will seem like white noise. Naturally, we are not talking about 100% probability: you may not be lucky enough to run into a specialist who will grind you into flour. But this rarely happens in manual testing.
Third. Confidence is interest. At least, such an association arises in humans. To give your interest some concrete form, as soon as the chance arises, ask the interviewer questions about the project in which you will potentially work, try to keep the questions adequate and relevant to your activities.
Fourth. Whether you're interviewing on camera or in person, your confidence should be conveyed not only through your voice, but also through non-verbal cues. What is important is not to be annoying.
I remember a case when, during an interview, a candidate’s gaze constantly wandered, and his hand was fiddling with some object (maybe an anti-stress object?) that made an unpleasant sound. I had to make a remark. In 90% of cases, such an interview will be a failure. Not because the person did it on purpose, but simply because other people will have negative impressions from such a review.
A nuance that will increase your salary
***
During the interview, the candidate is asked:
— What frameworks do you know?
—Spring
– What else do you know?
— Django, React, Vie, Angular and many other interesting words.
When looking for a job, any person focuses on offers that are attractive from a financial point of view. You can talk as much as you like about the importance of comfort in a team and the value of new experience, but a stable income is a stable income.
In fact, it turns out that the candidate is ready to work in any galleys, exchanging the dream team for a dubious company of colleagues. And, if desired, he can quickly retrain from a long-term investor of his future into a speculator of today.
It is much more important to understand what knowledge and what circumstances will allow an ordinary manual tester to raise the salary bar.
If you are waiting for some specifics, I hasten to disappoint you – there are none. You can’t say “learn this and you’ll get this much.” But there are several wisdom and ways that will help you get on the right rake.
Wisdom 1: Just ask your boss for a salary increase
Some of you may be indignant – if everything were so simple, I would have asked a long time ago.
OK. But why don't you do this?
If the answer is that you lack qualifications and experience, make a lot of mistakes and generally “how have I not been kicked out of here yet,” then the action plan is obvious – go and fill in the gaps.
Or maybe you’re just afraid: “They’ll refuse me, they’ll start looking at me askance, and they’ll even fire me.”
These prejudices arise due to psychological barriers, negative attitudes that prevent people from moving forward. Someone has a family and a mortgage – under no circumstances should they lose their job. Someone in the past had a similar request turned down and actually got fired. Some people are so afraid of change that they simply look for excuses not to move.
True, as long as you remain silent, your salary will not increase. There is a chance that you will come across a boss – a tyrant, who, in response to your request, will begin to reproach you. But this will only be proof that under the current leadership nothing will happen to you.
I often remember one boss whose position was simple and clear: “If you don’t ask, then you don’t have to.”
It's hard to argue with such logic. If a person is silent, everything suits him in the eyes of others.
If you really deserve a promotion and your management thinks so, this does not mean that you will be happy to approve it. Be prepared that you will have to prove it and work hard, because in the eyes of your bosses and management you are nothing more than an asset to the company. Increase your value.
Wisdom 2: Know your worth.
The ability to correctly assess your value in the labor market is one of the most important skills of any specialist. To a company, you are nothing more than an asset from which it expects to make a certain profit.
The math here is simple:
If you work well: you don’t cause problems for others, you don’t make mistakes, you have a positive influence on the team, you do your job, then your value as an asset is stable and will bring profit in the long term.
If you perform poorly: you make mistakes and don’t learn from them, you’re not able to build relationships with your team, you get complaints, then your value as an asset is unstable, toxic, and it’s generally better to get rid of you to avoid future losses.
If you work super-productively: you can exceed the norm, work with several activities or projects at once, go to meet the company halfway, have a unique set of knowledge that no one else in the entire team has – your value is rapidly increasing and, most likely, will grow even more over time (all stable stocks also work).
Everyone around you – bosses, colleagues, friends or family – can tell you anything about the situation on the market, in the country and in the world, comparing your knowledge and the knowledge of spherical specialists whom you have never seen. However, the truth is always the same – no one knows a person’s worth better than himself.
As an example, I will borrow an analogy from one of the most famous investors. The stock market is a crazy neighbor who shouts every morning that he will buy your apartment today for 1 million, tomorrow for 1 kopeck, and the day after tomorrow for 50,000. Only you know how much this very apartment costs.
The same analogy can be applied to the labor market and the value of a person expressed in his salary.
Even if now your value on the market is not so high due to various factors, you must clearly understand what your skills and current experience are worth, which with due persistence will also grow. However, you should always remember that such confidence should not be based on the fact that you are a good person, love and value yourself, but on the results that you have achieved.
Wisdom 3. If there is no promotion, change jobs.
A drastic decision that, however, works if you intend to get promoted.
You may find yourself in a situation where the employer simply cannot meet your wishes. Perhaps he would be happy to arrange your long-awaited promotion, but the economics of the project do not allow it. Or you were simply unlucky with your manager.
In such circumstances, you have no choice but to change your job. Competitors will be happy to welcome a smart specialist with open arms, offering as many goodies as possible. Despite the competition in the market, the door to valuable assets is always open. Naturally, provided that you are confident in your skills and, as noted above, you know your worth. Otherwise, all this will turn into a spectacle of absurdity and inappropriate clownery, the result of which will be “returning home” or a change from “stuff to soap”.
