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This is the story of a 38yo white male in Europe, I have 4 kids depending on me and my financial situation is secure. After moving this summer we found that not only wont we need to move for like the coming two decades, our cost of living went down and will go down further in the coming years due to smart financial management (by my wife I must add, I am an idiot with money and the smartest I ever did was hand it all over to her). This lead to me reconsidering my work situation and how lovely I have been behaving to my family the last year due to stupid stress at work. It is time for a change, if only for my wife's sanity. And seriously, never watch American Beauty when almost 40, drunk on Scotch and the rest of the house already asleep. A short summary of my career: 20yo- drop out of med school 20~22- wait tables and deliver pizzas for a living 22~26- have a series of lovely jobs to get by after knocking someone up twice 26- after divorce stumble into the next lovely job, being a manual software tester for some company 27~30- actually happen to have a proficiency for software testing, work my way upwards to the top of the garbage heap. 30~38- switch companies often, lie a lot on your resume and during interviews, become a project manager on huge projects with a 6 figure income now- hate my life as it is build on lies and I don't enjoy the work or the money. Also I have discovered I am not very good at management and can no longer bring up the energy to pretend I am. After thinking the above over for a few months now, I want to try and get back into test execution and leave all the management poo poo behind me. In the roughly 12~13 years I have been in the software QA field a lot changed, especially when it comes to automation, Agile, open source tools and stuff like continuous delivery. Basically I would like to make it my job to help organizations in their often misconceived efforts of test automation and speedy go-live, but not from a bullshitting perspective but from an technical implementation pov. For this I need to revisit a bunch of skills and add on some more. In 2008 I would give trainings in testing, including the basics of automation, so there is some dormant knowledge. What I would like to do (in my spare time) is set up a system where my contribution to some open source project would consist of a frequent: 1. Download codebase from git or something 2. Compile 3. deploy testserver 4. run regression tests 5. log bugs or fix testset 6. build new tests based on new functionality Some tools are already in sight, all needs to be OS for reasons. But what I am aiming at to use is Selenium, Linux/Virtualbox for the servers and using Jenkins to manage it all, some SQL if possible, Cucumber and/or FitNesse. Programming language I would prefer Java or Python. All these are the most asked for in my local market that I think I can learn in some 6 months which is the time I want to start and try to market myself in a different role. In case you care, they also ask for XML/SOAP/SOAPUI and Jira but both are not really an option in my home setup and if you disagree, please let me know. Everyone is asking for Agile so I will add the pointless CSM thing as it can only help. With all the above, what would be a fitting project that I can practice on and that might have some use of my contribution? I have some technical proficiency and can pick up stuff really fast.
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Jan 1, 2016 20:42
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| # ? May 3, 2024 22:16 |
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Move forward not back. Go all in on the lies. Buy a mid-tier MBA diploma from a Tor marketplace (just incase, if they actually background check and can't verify it) and gun for an executive position at a mid size company (50-200 employees). I'd go for CTO of something old fashion like medical supply. Don't be a pussy.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:12
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Keetron posted:This is the story of a 38yo white male in Europe, I have 4 kids depending on me and my financial situation is secure. After moving this summer we found that not only wont we need to move for like the coming two decades, our cost of living went down and will go down further in the coming years due to smart financial management (by my wife I must add, I am an idiot with money and the smartest I ever did was hand it all over to her). This lead to me reconsidering my work situation and how lovely I have been behaving to my family the last year due to stupid stress at work. It is time for a change, if only for my wife's sanity. And seriously, never watch American Beauty when almost 40, drunk on Scotch and the rest of the house already asleep. Something something PHP
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Mar 26, 2016 01:38
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Pixelboy posted:Something something PHP I ended up with MantisBT, which from a tesing perspective is pretty backwards but it allows me to practice using Selenium and the other tools I want to be proficient in. While I seriously doubt my contribution will ever be merged with the rest of the project, it is fun to do anyway.
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Mar 26, 2016 15:06
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You're having a mini-crisis and you need to talk to a counselor or therapist or something, not the internet. If you really, seriously think doing some software testing is going to help your situation (huh?) you could start by looking at trending projects here: https://github.com/trending they are likely going to have the least tests and worst documentation because they're generally newer projects.
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Mar 26, 2016 19:16
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A 6-figgy PM is pretty impressive, I would imagine quite a bit of stress though for it. Not a long term position for mental health.
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Mar 28, 2016 03:23
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Oddly enough, after voicing my plans to my employer it was silent for a few weeks and now I have been offered to "turn techy" by being trained in exactly those things I have been working on for the last two months being Selenium, Java, JUnit and Git (although they rather have me use Subversion). There is a project lined up that needs a bunch of technical people and someone to be a teamlead for a few hours a week to talk to the client while still working on the code. This being exactly the project I was hoping for, I am holding my breath. Can't remember being excited for work this much in years.
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Apr 1, 2016 09:35
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