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How often to change jobs
Experience from 1.5 to 3-3.5 years is ideal.
The person was definitely able to benefit his company, learned something and taught his colleagues, got a significant result, while still not ossified. In addition, changing jobs every 2-3 years gives a boost in money: unfortunately, salaries inside the company are growing more slowly than in the market.
The opposite effect also occurs with employees who have been working in companies for more than 4-6 years. It was our grandparents who could have worked in one place for 30 years, but now this creates preconditions for problems. After such a period, it is sometimes difficult to change jobs: there is "archaic", well-established views on the principles of work. It is difficult to get a job in a new company, because there are beliefs that everything is wrong and everything is wrong - subconsciously looking for something similar to the past place according to a set of criteria. Only over time, if you change jobs every 2-3 years, you get mobility and readiness for a new one.
But I don't really like the "runners" - people who change jobs more often than once a year. There are certain advantages in this, for example, a person worked with different stacks, in different teams, but it often turns out that these people had a problem in the external environment, and not in themselves.
How to find the "right" company
Search for a company "for the soul".
Every company I worked for was somehow interesting to me in products.
- I love games, that's why I tested these products with pleasure at the Buka company and others who were developing computer games.
- I worked at Innova - a great company, also a game dev.
- Worked for ivi, which I use products.
- I worked at Mail.ru for 4 years and still use many products.
- When I worked at SberMarket in the first months, I was sitting at home, conducting another interview, a courier from SberMarket came to me and brought me food, because I could not go for groceries myself. I worked at SberMarket, and SberMarket helped me!
When the products that you are engaged in bring pleasure, benefit and joy to yourself, then it is doubly pleasant to work on them.
I am a person with a pragmatic systemic mindset, so I have other selection criteria that I add to the table: write “for”, “against”, compare
Opportunities for development within the company : new horizons, tasks, challenges. They must always be "with a hill" in order to "jump over their heads."
Collective . A lot depends on the first contact, be it a recruiter or a future leader. Therefore, I try to focus on this when I hire myself.
Technology... There are hype technologies, even very overheated ones. I try to let them brew like good wine, and only then take it. With age, I have become more conservative - I don't go into adventurous projects, stability is important to me.
How open the company is to various kinds of innovations - is it ready for bold steps or does it need some kind of evolutionary development? Both options work if the company understands how it develops and what values it adheres to.
How ready the company is for your development . There are companies that, for various reasons, recruit Junes or Middleles for little money and gradually, step by step, pump them. But if a business needs results here and now, then you won't go far in the junes and midlays.
I worked for a company that only needed seniors. On the one hand, it is great - high business results. On the other hand, there are big risks, because the seniors begin to shove with their elbows. For example, in SberMarket, we do not hire Juns now, only middles, seniors, leads. Over time, we will rebalance the teams. But from the business should come the appropriate tasks. I would not want to throw inexperienced Juns into a hellish cauldron: they will get injured and will never again want to approach IT from a kilometer away.
Therefore, at the entrance, as a candidate, it is important for you to find out what course the company is following: looking for the best of the best, harmoniously selecting a team, or gathering conditional beginners in order to develop them. Depending on this, you can understand whether you will fit into the concept or not.
How to prepare for an interview
About half of the candidates come in without any preparation - they haven't heard of the company and the product.
The ideal candidate read the articles, watched videos from some speeches, mentions in the media, tested the product and got ready.
Rest assured . An uncertain candidate immediately raises questions - maybe he is the same at work?
Be honest . Sincerity is an important personality trait that is also in demand in work. For example, if you go to an interview not to get a job, but to evaluate yourself as a professional, then speak about it directly. The employer will not be put off by this, because it is still possible to talk to a quality specialist, unleash his potential and make him, in the end, a great offer.
But if you hide it and at the end of the interview it suddenly turns out that “oh, I'm not really looking for a job, I just walk around, increase my self-esteem,” then you will not get anything good in your address. Speak directly, do not be cunning, do not force the interviewee to conduct an "interrogation".
Decide on pricing , decide on your salary bracket. For example, I ask the expected minimum and maximum salary.
- The minimum is calculated according to basic needs: children, family, help to parents.
- The maximum is assessed by professional capabilities. For example, you cannot cost a million rubles if you do not know how to work for this million.
The employer himself will increase the value, if it is seen in the market, in the sensations, in the skills that the person showed at the interview.
What questions to ask in an interview
The main recommendation is to ask questions in general.
Unfortunately, as a company representative, I often come across a situation when the candidates themselves do not ask questions, as if they are on the exam. But then I try to promote the person myself, sometimes I set traps: I don’t tell something about the company for the person to clarify himself.
For me, as a hiring manager, the best interview is one that turns into an interview with me as an employer. I understand that a person is involved when they bombard me with questions:
- What about your stack? Why did you choose such a stack? And what about automation? How do you collect reports? How do you track incidents in production?
And you sit as if you were interrogating a man from the Lubyanka, they look at you, ask questions, it's great.
Ask questions that will hedge risksrepetition of the mistakes that you encountered in previous jobs. A classic of the genre: a person talks about how sad he was to work in all the previous jobs, where he was deceived for money, promised a position, but not given, where he was laid off.
- Okay, do you have any questions for me?
And he does not underline straws, does not draw conclusions from past situations, does not find out from the future employer what is important. This is a very alarming sign both for me as a hiring manager and for a person: he must draw some conclusions from those life situations in which he found himself earlier.
Build your own top priority questions... They are different for everyone, and should be prioritized. The way you ask questions positions you as a potential employee of the company. The same questions about vacations, buns and salaries are of interest to any candidate, and it's strange not to ask them, and then shrug their shoulders: "How, the salary is gray ?!" Many got into the opportunity, just not asking a question. The sequence of these questions is also important. On the doorstep, asking questions about "goodies" and bonuses, without showing due attention to the composition and conditions of the work itself, is a bad form and a bad sign.
Tasks... I often talk about my interviews on webinars or on Habré, so I try to change tasks. There are candidates who try to cheat in preparation for the interview. For example, they don't say that they have already solved the problem they were given at the interview 1000 times. If he says - great, let's talk about something else, it's always great. But for the most part, candidates are not so open and honest with their future employer. When the employer understands everything, it can discredit you in the eyes of the employer.
About personal hiring preferences
Requirements strongly depend on what kind of specialist we are talking about. To June - some, to middle, senior, lead - others. For example, now I have high technical requirements, in addition to software, when selecting juns. I definitely ask about:
- client-server architecture;
- how modern applications work;
- how they communicate with the server;
- what the server can respond to;
- what tools are used to localize defects;
- what testing techniques should be used;
- what types of testing are needed.
And I already want to see this from June.
Responsibility . But there are common things, they are characteristic for any position and lie beyond any plane of key competencies in the classical sense. For example, I check the level of responsibility of a person. I ask about fakaps: it is important that a person sincerely knows how to admit his mistakes, talk about how he corrects them, understands their reasons, and how he insured himself against repeating fakups in the future.
If a person is an irresponsible fool, they cannot be sent to training in responsible performance of tasks. He will not be able to come in a week and say: "I understood everything, now I am a cool responsible guy." Such an outcome is very unlikely. But if a person does not have enough knowledge of SQL, working with bug reports, sniffers, these skills can be learned in the foreseeable future, this does not require two university courses for 8 hours every day.
Priorities . I draw attention to the priorities in basic needs. This is a story of self-development, image, security, money, psychological and physical comfort. One way or another, these needs should be prioritized relative to each other.
The qualities listed above are needed both for the team lead and for an ordinary employee who would perform basic operations. At the same time, it is clear that it is impossible to find a person who has all the characteristics of the maximum at once. It's like in an RPG: you enter, you are given 10 points, and you can invest 2 points in strength, 3 in dexterity, 5 in intelligence, and 1 in luck. Here's something similar going on in real life. These things are fundamental personality traits that either cannot be adjusted or are very problematic.
How to find a job for Jun after courses
It is difficult for Junams now - crowds of people want to get into IT. At the same time, the entry threshold has grown significantly. In 2005, I got into IT as a junior tester, then there was no particular competition, everyone wanted to work with you on two projects in the portfolio. In 2010, it was enough to read a book by Roma Savin, and that's it, like you're already trained.
It's much more complicated now. Some people, inspired by the slogans “enter IT”, think: “Okay, I'll go, I'll pay 30-40-50-100 thousand rubles for courses, and magical uncles and aunts will lead me to the wonderful world of IT”. This does not happen, the june is not snatched away with legs and hands. Companies are fighting for middles and seniors, they use heavy artillery in the form of IT HR, recruiting agencies, hunt and do other non-trivial things.
But at the start it is difficult. You need endurance, a willingness to work not just for food, but for an idea, for your own knowledge, for getting relevant experience. Subsequently, this will bear fruit.
Communicate with friends - word of mouth has always worked and will be. Find out if someone has some kind of pet project that needs to be tested. If for a person not "put in a word", but a couple of paragraphs of normal arguments, then you can communicate with a person.
Choose a company... It is important that the junior understands where he is going. Just serving two years in some no-name company, engaging in incomprehensible testing that does not fit any type of what you read in books or took courses is not an experience. For example, I saw Juns with 4 years of experience: they got into a not very successful company and had very superficial knowledge and competencies, but thought that they were getting super experience and now they would be torn off with arms and legs. It doesn't work that way.
Learn . Many Juns believe that the moment they get their first job, they don't have to study anymore. In this regard, QA, like any other IT specialist, must constantly develop and learn.
The real experience is free. There are Testbirds, Utest services, there are full-fledged beta testing programs, when you communicate, set a task, work with tools for beta testers. All this is already a "combat run-in". At the same time, you can do this in parallel with work and get real work experience. It is quite specific, it is a kind of bug bounty program, where they pay more for found defects. But you will learn how to make bug reports, get real experience. This can already be entered into the resume.
Soft skills vs hard skills
Soft skills are more difficult to develop than hard skills. Some hard skills do not require large-scale training at all. But this does not mean that technical skills for juniors, middles and seniors are not evaluated. They are needed, but they are implied at the hygienic level, especially for QA.
Hard skills are still relevant in test automation. This is a rather non-trivial and complex task. You can't just take it, learn a programming language and start automating. You can't take Selenium or Appium, read two articles about it and start automating. This needs to be glued together, there are many more things to learn, so automators are especially appreciated, and they approach the interview more closely in terms of technical skills.
Soft skills- these are things related to negotiation, for example. QA often acts as a person who cares, he acts as a defender of a particular position. It is not necessary to read super-smart books and attend specialized trainings, although this is not bad either. But over a short distance, you should at least be confident in your own position and know that you have theses and arguments. If any dispute is stressful for you, then you need to do something about it, this is one of the key growth points.
Planning... I make sure that a person knows how to plan - his own time, resource (money, time, entrusted tools, etc.). This basic skill determines how successful a person will be in general in life. If he is constantly late everywhere, a constant lack of time, then it will be very difficult for him to find time for self-development, learning something.
Self-study . I often hear from candidates, especially from the middle ones: "I want to grow, but they don't let me grow." Some people believe that after passing numerous schools, courses, trainings, passing the ISTQB certificate, they receive an indulgence. A person removes responsibility from himself for the result, for the knowledge gained, development and his own growth.
There is a kaizen technique. If you want to start doing something, then start devoting five minutes a day to this activity. If you can't find five minutes a day to read, study something, then you have problems with motivation, and not with time.
It's important to be clear about what you need . The ISTQB certification is a cool thing. It helps a lot to sell a resource if, for example, you want to work in system integrators. The courses are cool, super, they provide somewhere a base, somewhere - to work with tools, somewhere - the possibility of real employment. But it is important to understand that everyone is a blacksmith of their own happiness, and a lot in this profession and in IT in general depends on your initiative and focus on self-education.
What to download and how to develop to become a QA team lead
It is not so much skills that are more important than character traits.
A certain cohort of people is more likely to become leaders due to character traits and personality traits. If you are aiming for team leads, management positions, try to correlate character traits - your own and those necessary for work. But this does not mean that if they do not exist, then it is impossible to develop.
- It is important that a person, in principle, has some kind of titanic self-confidence , in his own strength, because a leader must lead people along with him. If the leader hesitates, then these vibrations are transmitted down the entire chain.
- Initiative . Many people think that you can become a senior executive, or be the first to join the team, and in chronological order, the oldest employee will be selected. But even in the army it doesn't work that way. It depends on initiative whether you become a successful team lead or not.
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There are other competencies and skills that contribute to success. It's a planning job, a tech stack. The leader does not always have to possess skills that overlap all the competencies of the employees of his department. On the contrary, in an ideal universe, the team should complement the competencies of the leader.
If the leader is the smartest in the team and knows everything better than any member of the team, then he is probably a mediocre leader - apparently, he is afraid to take on his team people who are smarter than him. Therefore, as a manager, I recommend recruiting people to the team who are more competent than you on certain issues. Otherwise, your ship is unlikely to sail far.
Personal brand... One way or another, you must broadcast your model of thinking both within the team and outside it so that they would like to work with you. In this way, you will maintain, develop and popularize the image of a leader. This will significantly simplify a whole range of tasks with which you have to work as a team lead, whether it is hiring, adapting people, motivating them for labor exploits.
Read the latest information . Use Habrom, Software testing, Automated info and similar resources. There are many channels in Telegram where they post up-to-date information. Because QA, like all IT in general, is a dynamically developing story. If you are reading a 2015 article on mobile app automation, then be careful. It is likely that in five years everything has changed in this direction.
Requiredlook for an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained in practice . Not necessarily at work, it can be a pet project where you do automation. Try to become a junior automator and tell the employer:
- I want to do automation, took one free course, bought another course, learned the language, learned the framework, here is my profile on GitHub, I tried to write a few tests in Python, I tried it on Java has a little to do, here I solved an interesting problem .
Yes, maybe it will be imperfect code, the solution of some very basic tasks, the simplest options, but this will already show that you are ready to invest in your own knowledge, this will help you.
QA — headz.io. -, : , , , , — .