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EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Chiming in on the Agile talk, I took over as Test Manager two projects that work side by side and used to have a separate Test Manager but ho hum I guess we made the other guy redundant so I can do both right? Anyway they're both supposed to be Agile, one I've been working on since I started at the company (~2 years) and the team is well-versed in the procedures, everything runs smoothly, we hit our release dates consistently and everyone is busy but not overworked. The other, new, one, is a loving shitshow. It's a new platform that was released without really working well, they spent 6 months trying to fix it in live, and at the point I took over they had just about got it working (even though 75% of the tickets in each sprint are fixes for it, what they actually did was close the "Warranty Defect" board and move them all into the normal sprint scope).

The team itself is hilariously dysfunctional. The project manager is a joke and has done nothing really since I've been involved, the product owner apparently hates her job, the scrum master is very good at booking meetings and not a lot else (lol that's every scrum master). The point of this isn't to toot my own horn, but I ended up doing a hell of a lot to drag them along into the real world and even then I was spending like 90% of my time trying to sort them out. I'm currently sat in a sprint planning meeting right now that we are taking in probably 50% too much work, the last sprint we delivered about 6 out of 20 tickets because a P1 was raised and all the devs apparently had to sort it (without telling anyone else, and was only picked up when they kept missing their delivery dates). Nobody talks to each other despite us spending all of my time in meetings with them.

It's a shame because the workers on the ground, i.e. my test team and the dev team are actually all good, but the leaders are just incapable of changing their ways. We're replacing the project manager this week which might improve things a bit and the scrum master is leaving soon as well so I'm going to look forward to having about 100 meetings cancelled and rebooked by the new one.

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EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

lamb posted:

My job, a company of over 30,000 people, uses Lotus Notes.

My company is also using Lotus Notes.

We are transitioning to Office 365 this year.

My god do I hope that as IT we get first dibs, because this is the most painful software I've ever used.

Within about 3 days of starting I figured a way around the most annoying parts (emails opening in the same windows, SameTime pinging at loving ungodly volumes, Lotus Notes becoming the active window at any notification) and was treated by some sort of god as a result.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

We have four week sprints. For one of my teams this works perfectly - we start to get tickets into test in the second week, the work flows nicely, and we can plan accordingly. Two of my teams are completely incapable of doing this. We are entering week four of the sprint and we haven't had a single ticket to test. It was supposed to be released at lunchtime and they've suddenly found issues so it'll be delayed until at least Monday. I've replanned the testing with my senior TA and there's literally no way we can meet the deadline, so of course it'll go down as testing missing the deadlines because we're the last in the line.

I keep getting asked how we can get better and "loving tell the devs to do their loving jobs" is apparently not an acceptable answer. Either they can't estimate their work correctly or they have no idea what's actually required and I'm not sure which is worse.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I agree with all of these points, even the contradictory ones.

The problem is the one team completely bought into Agile, worked on it so everyone was playing to the same tune, and now have an agreed cadence, and the other two just... haven't. They're technically separate projects (one public facing, one behind a paywall) so they're managed in slightly different ways.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I actually have something of praise to say about my disfunctional teams/the Agile process. We knew we were going to miss our release date last week about 2 weeks ago, and then as we got closer to the new release date released we would need an additional week. The team spent a few days scrabbling around to try and shuffle resource around so we could deliver everything, as well as two new features that were supposed to go into the new sprint, when our manager(/Release Train Engineer but that's a loving stupid title and I refuse to use it) came in and said no. We failed the sprint. It stops when it was supposed to stop. We won't release anything and pick it up in the next one. This is something I've been pushing for but the business people really want to see release go brr.

This has meant we've not really taken anything new into this sprint, so there's no additional pressures, and one of the new features has been descoped entirely. I have time now! Time to do review and improvements and think about stuff! It's loving glorious.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

We (and be we I mean the management who haven't even bothered to speak to the teams involved) have decided to bring in a new Agile coach to try and fix one of the more dysfunctional teams. I had an hour meeting with him where I explained all the bullshit that's going on. I could visibly see the enthusiasm drain from his face.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

So just found out that both the test analysts in my terrible are team are leaving in the next two weeks (outsourced resource so short notice period).

And their test lead is leaving in a month.

... and I have a second interview on Thursday so may be handing in my notice next week.

This is going to go so very, very well!

Hopefully they'll realise the terrible culture of the team is burning people out because there's no way you can keep up with the pace without doing 10-12 hour days every day.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I've been offered a new job! I am fully aware that I'll end up having the same/similar problems at the new place because all companies are, in the end, the same. But this place want to pay me an extra £15-20k for the trouble so gently caress it!

This is going to cause a perfect storm of trouble at my current company though. This is now 4 people from the same chain leaving right around the same time. I wonder if they'll look at the reasons why (lol of course they won't).

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

GI_Clutch posted:

Our company just posted the eNPS score from the recent survey. 19! The scores broken down by department were -14, -7, 7, 77, with the final score being from corporate. They even posted all of the anonymous comments submitted including ones calling out low pay, the company's joke of a survey pretending they might change their mind about letting people continue working from home (but culture!), and calling out the owner for hiring his daughter and promoting her to a top position after laying off 30 people over the past year.

They also addressed how so many people were worried due to the number of departures so far this year (to companies that would let them work from home) by saying that they knew stuff like that would happen based on studies they had seen. But I guess when your mind is made up about making people come back to the office, why try to stop the hemorrhaging of employees who've been here up to a decade or more?

We had our eNPS scores posted a month or so ago. In general, the scores were really positive and I think our department (IT) went from like 13 to 64, a massive jump. Generally things were really positive and everyone was happy with the result. However, one of the big negatives was the diversity and inclusion score which (again, for our department) was something like -14.

Now, I'm a straight white guy and I fully understand how that can cloud my viewpoint, but it's worth saying that one of my two managers is female and the other an ethnic minority, my two fellow test managers are both women and one is an ethnic minority, and 4 of the 5 testers are women. This is something that's fairly consistent across the department - there are plenty of women, ethnic minorities, or both, in leadership roles, in management roles, and throughout the company. As a team, we agreed in our initial meeting that we didn't think this score was representative of our department.

But because it was the major negative, we've had no less than 3 follow up meetings specifically about this, and every time we've said we don't agree with or understand why the score is as it is.

Anyway, handed in my notice today :toot:

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I just started my new job on Monday and today had my first office/company-wide meeting to get some training on some stupid HR thing where you can give fake money to people to recognise their work. By my last count, roughly 1000 people were trying to get into this Teams meeting. Teams struggles with any more than about 200 people in a single meeting.

The first part was fine but was punctuated by literally hundreds of comments in the chat from people saying they were unable to join. The presenter either didn't notice them or decided to power through. He then tried to hand over to someone else and they either couldn't get in or didn't get off mute. This then led to literally 15 minutes of silence. Someone decided to come off mute and either loudly eat or let their dog lick their microphone. Then say "gently caress this". The presenter continued to stare blankly at the screen before apparently taking a phone call. The chat is now half "can't get in" and half "can't hear anything". Some brave soul comes off mute and suggests that we reschedule. Still nothing from the presenter, who is still on his phone. People start getting annoyed with the constant chat notifications and decide to spam "STOP SAYING YOU CAN'T GET IN WE KNOW".

I left after 25 minutes having learned absolutely nothing. I assume they'll reschedule.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I know this is the dumb poo poo thread but it's so refreshing to go into a new company that does Agile and have stand ups that actually last 10 minutes, everyone is super concise about what they're working on and there's an understanding that anything that needs to be discussed in greater detail will be picked up after. The backlog is somewhat orderly (we also hired a Product Owner at the same time as me who needs to sort it out a bit) and there's a good flow of work.

I'm sure at some point the penny will drop and I'll find out the weird poo poo they do (like the massive spreadsheet report I need to fill out - but that's getting replaced soon) but christ this is a nice feeling compared to the last shitshow I worked at.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Oh I've found a wrinkle in my new job. One of the teams I'm attached to/supporting is a small 3 man team that we bought out a few years ago. They work on a very specific bit of software to basically do video encoding/decoding. They currently have no QA so that's my area to look out. However, they get through 3 work items a month, and release every two months. Their currently backlog is about 97 items and it is increasing at double their 3/month output. The current plan has them clearing the backlog in mid-2023.

Apparently there is no appetite from upper management to hire new staff into this team to give them a hand so everyone's just kinda shrugging their shoulders and watching the list grow and grow and grow.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Barudak posted:

This is not dumb poo poo, my work evacuated nearly all (might be all not sure) 340+ Ukranian employees and their families out of Kharkiv and Kyiv to safer places/countries

My company also does a lot of work with a Ukrainian company. A few of my team have managed to escape to other countries, but we lost contact with the majority (and had to cancel all their Teams access etc. for security reasons).

Today the whole team managed to join our stand up :dance: some of them looking a little worse for wear (and still in Kharkiv/Kyiv), but after two weeks of nothing it was great to see them. Not entirely sure I'd be so eager to work though.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

We've gone back to the office for the last month or so. We were told to agree with our teams two days a week so not everyone is in on the same day - though I think everyone's agreed some combination of Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. It's... fine? Fortunately I'm not so busy and can plan my week sufficiently that I do all my work on those two days and the three days I spend at home I can catch up on admin or... well "catch up on admin".

If we go to 3 or more days i might have a trouble though. I've also forgotten how god drat annoying it is when you're trying to be on a call and the person next to you (or in the case of yesterday, three rows of desks away) is loudly chatting with someone sat near them.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I think I've talked about it before ITT but my current place has kind of implemented Agile... perfectly? The team - on their own - decide what they're going to do in a period of time. They get through that work and release it, or they don't and they either extend the iteration or kick everything else to the next one. We chat every morning about what we're working on and it takes less than 10 minutes. The things we release are small enough to be testable (most of the time) in the iteration. Of course it's software development so it is the perfect use case for Agile, but there's basically 0 problems with the approach.

Of course, we don't (and as far as I know have never) employ an Agile coach. The team settled into this on their own. Nobody is demanding we use planning poker or refer to stories instead of tasks.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I've been in this job for... nearly 2 years now (christ) and while largely it's fine there's been this problem bubbling under the surface which has now exploded and caused chaos everywhere.

To give the short explanation, we have three delivery teams: a UI team based out of India, a middle layer team that's responsible for about 75% of the services in the software, and the infrastructure team that I work in that handles logging, reporting, auditing etc. (among a few other things). By the nature of the work my team does, when we "release" something it usually needs work by the middle layer team to actually... do something, and sometimes the UI team as well (though that's less important).

Ever since I've joined there's been a growing backlog of work we've completely and they're not able to pick up and take over the line. Initially they just didn't come to release meetings and refused to acknowledge we had completed it, but then they got forced to attend and give confirmation that they needed to do something. They've then been stuck trying to release a major version of our software due to performance issues for... six months. The whole time we've been building a bigger and bigger backlog of work.

The issue we have now is that we've run out of work. There's basically nothing else we can do because we know it will sit on a shelf for 6-8 months for them to do anything about it, and the project managers aren't willing to give us more stuff to do because they know it won't get delivered for half a year. We've had to scramble like hell to fill time doing odd jobs, things that can be released independently, or working on new long-term projects. The obvious solution is for our team to be allowed to do that middle layer (we have the skills and knowledge) but for some reason nobody's willing to sign off on that.

So now we're just... plodding along, while the other team are absolutely manic with work. It was a problem I foresaw happening when I joined, that everyone acknowledged, and nobody did anything about it. Dumb poo poo all round.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Ever since I started I've had about 1hr15m of mandatory meetings every morning. That's mostly listening, I contribute probably once a week. Then I average about another hour of meetings every day, half of them I run half I just listen to.

Outside of that, some weeks I have literally nothing to do. I can create some bullshit reports or write up some nonsense to look busy during the 2 days I'm in the office, and the rest of the time I just play games on my PC and watch YouTube. Some weeks I do have a decent amount of work going on but as much as possible I just squeeze that into those two days even if it means doing a longer day.

I have spoken to my boss before about this - he's perfectly happy with my contribution, I get good reviews, and the higher ups seem to like me (or at least not care). What's weird is I have equivalents on other teams and they look constantly snowed under. I have no idea why. I think I'm just lucky the people I "manage" (it's not even really management) and pretty much all competent and get on with their work without me interfering.

I've considered moving but 1) I've past two years here so they can't just get rid of me (not that that's likely), and 2) I think I'd struggle to find somewhere that'd pay me enough to justify actually doing a full 5 days a week. And hell, it beats the hell out of the stress from my last place. Maybe if I get bored in a few years.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

This isn't really affecting me but my boss was bitching to me about it in our catchup today so I thought I'd share here.

One of our teams creates software that processes videos (e.g. from CCTV) and converts it into standard .mp4 files. For some stupid reason they never set out boundaries of what they'd accept when selling this to our customers, so we get every loving £5 camera off amazon coming through with it's own format/codec whatever. This has been going on for a couple of years and whenever it doesn't work the customer raises a support request for it, which is now nearing 300 and each one takes weeks to code a solution for. They're coming in faster than we can fix them.

To try and stem this flow my boss (and his boss etc.) instituted a new process. If it's something we already support and is broken, then it can carry on as a support request, and if it's a new file/codec we've never seen it'll get put down as a feature and be prioritised. Kind of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic but at least we can get to the actual problems quicker and give the customers a realistic estimate of when they will get the new feature.

The problem is that all our British customers have decided they don't give a poo poo about the new process and are ignoring it entirely, while all our American customers have moved everything to be a feature while keeping the support request open. So they've just... doubled everyone's work (most of all my boss who has to triage all these). If he had any hair he would have pulled it all out by now.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Splicer posted:

Do you have a queue manager position because they would be genuinely invaluable for unfucking this by fixing all the customer bullshit before it reaches people who fix all the technical bullshit. People underestimate the value of a good queue manager.

You have half a good system here, the problem is that you're letting the customers decide what's logged as an incident vs what's logged as a feature request.

This is allegedly my boss's position (well, along with a few other things). The problem is more the higher ups are happy to let the customers dictate this and not support him. I don't want to doxx myself so I won't go into details but the nature of the customers means they're happy to bend over backwards.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Chewbecca posted:

Question for the thread: When putting together a job application or responding to interview questions, how far back do you draw your examples from? Can it be from any time in your career that's relevant, or do you have a 'cut off' (e.g. 10 years)

The funniest CV I've ever seen was someone who applied for an entry level QA job. They decided to list their entire work history stretching back to a cashier job they had back in the 80s. It was nearly 35 years of employment history. Almost none of it was relevant but they obviously thought I needed to know that in the mid 90s they were working as a receptionist.

Don't do that, obviously.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

I keep meaning to post about this but every time I go to it almost gets resolved. It is now very Not Resolved and very very dumb. Sorry this might be a wall of text.

We released a new service about... four months ago (1.0). Essentially this service funnels all activity on the wider system into a database that users can then point Power Bi or whatever at to make some reports. Super basic explanation but that's the nuts of it.

Anyway this first version was released and our process is the dev teams do work until we're ready, it's tested within the team, then we pre-release it to a Solutions Team who do things like performance testing and check that it hasn't broken the rest of the system. This 1.0 version went through (albeit with some fixes due to performance) and was released to the customers, although nobody actually started using it.

During the release process our customer-facing people raised an issue that it was missing a piece of functionality. It wasn't missing, it was planned for the 3.0 release, and they knew that, but because the customer facing people promise everything to the customers, they had told all of them this was in. We therefore planned a 1.1 release that would include a bastardised version of the functionality that would hopefully tide them over.

We completed the changes in the 1.1 release and handed it over to the Solutions team. At this point the head of that team raised a concern with the Product Manager that if a user was to run a sufficiently stupid query against the database, the impact of that could bring the whole system down. Now, to be clear, he has never been able to prove this can happen. In fact, we're pretty sure that there are enough failsafes in place that even if they did run a query about 5 other services would stop it before it has done enough damage. He also never put this in writing, it was just vague verbal "concerns" to the PM who is in a panic about things at the best of time. She, of course, told us to stop the release and fix it.

We reviewed things and came up with the above reasons why we thought it couldn't happen (which were dismissed out of hand) but we could come up with a duplicated database which the queries run on in isolation, solving the problem (sort of). However, this would require customers to do some manual changes. The PM was not happy about this. We talked some more and came to an agreement that we would release anyway to one or two customers and monitor things, if it looks like they're causing the problem we could pull the plug before anything bad happens. No harm no foul.

Except... the Solution team guy wasn't in that conversation. He was on holiday (which was part of the problem, he raised this then hosed off for two weeks). Came back and said no he still wasn't happy to release. PM tells us to estimate how long doing the solution would be. We tell her it's about 3-4 weeks of work. She tells us she can't wait that long. So ???

The other wrinkle in this is that in the mean time we discovered a (legitimate) bug in the 1.1 release so there's a 1.2 stacked up behind it, there's a 2.0 release that we have queued up, and the 3.0 release is nearing dev completion. My boss is in charge of the releases so he's saying can we just merge all this into a single release at this stage, he's been told no, so even in an ideal scenario we're going to end up releasing 4 versions about three weeks apart.

It's all so loving stupid. The main problem is that when this Solutions team was created (about a year ago) they never came up with a defined process for them to reject a release and what that means. That means this one guy, thanks to his vague and unproven issues, can create a massive backlog and loads of additional and unnecessary work.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

DeeplyConcerned posted:

I'm a database newbie, but I'm curious how a single query can bring down an entire database? Is it a Bobby tables situation? Seems kind of hard to fix a bug that hasn't been formally described.

It's hard to explain without going into the actual architecture, but the simple explanation would be if we have a database with x tables, and a query is running against all of those tables, we can't write more data into those tables. That means that the queue builds up and up and then impacts the performance of the overall system as it has a load of messages constantly trying to write to a databse.

One of the mitigations we raised is that SQL will actually dump a query that goes on for too long, which is less than the time our messages try to retry. But, according to this guy, "it could still happen". So two months sat around talking in circles.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

It is, as the title of the thread indicates, an extremely dumb poo poo my work does :v:

Generally our processes are well defined and we progress through work at a good rate. It's just been this one case where there's not an obvious solution and conflicting responsibilities.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

We have three tiers of work poo poo happening.

A project is basically a quarter, we say "for the next x months we are going to do this work" and stretches across our whole delivery team.

A product is a major (i.e. 1.x) release of one of our systems (usually but not always within a project). This might be specific to a development team.

An iteration is usually (but not always) a 4 week period where a development team works on a product.

For each of these we have a checklist with multiple stages. A project has 4 stages - a pre-planning stage where the management have a rough idea of what they want, a planning stage where this is fleshed out into actual features, a commit stage where we check we have capacity to do that, and a completion stage where we talk about what was done. A product has roughly similar steps but with an extra production release step at the end, and an iteration only has three - planning, commit, completion.

My boss goes through this checklist pretty rigorously. He finds time in everyone's diaries to hold meetings to go through each of the questions, some of which are quite important. I've been doing some work recently to tidy up/improve the QA parts of it because it asks questions that everyone just says "Yes" to and doesn't deliver any value - the Security guys did the same just before Christmas. It's a lot of work for him to go through and find the time and fill things out.

We've discovered, as part of my review and his own work, that none of the other delivery teams loving bother with any of it. On the rare occasions they actually fill out the checklist, it's either done on the same day (so they complete and production release on the same day, when it's supposed to go to another team to verify) or they've just copied information from the previous one. Most of the time, though, it's entirely blank. Leading my boss and I to wonder what the gently caress are they actually doing?

Like yes I get that it's mostly just paperwork and everyone hates paperwork, but as I said there are some important questions about things like security and performance. Unsurprisingly, these delivery teams also generate the highest number of customer issues (which we're now having to help the Ops team to sort out because they're completely snowed under). Our director is pissed off with quality and is now funneling more money into the department to try and fix it. I'm pretty sure the mess would be massively helped by the delivery team leads actually doing their jobs.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Interviewed four contractors yesterday/today. Three of them are coming from the same company that is letting a bunch of them go for whatever reason. The three all work on the same project in the same team. They provided enough information that tracked with each other. We didn't ask, but it was fairly clear they knew each other and worked closely.

We asked a fairly basic question: how many people are on your team?

Somehow all three of them gave us a different answer. They didn't agree on the total number of people in the team, how they're structured, or how often they release the product. We're completely baffled.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

We deal with sensitive video and audio files as part of the job. If this is in the UK we need a certain level of clearance to have access (which takes loving ages to get), but when it comes from the US it seems you crazy yanks are perfectly fine any dickhead seeing them. Still need to confirm with whoever is providing them, though.

Guy in our customer support team has sent over a massive pack of files in a particular format we are working on that come from the US. We have asked him to confirm if they are Secure (i.e. only the people with the clearance can see them). He has refused to answer the question and says it's not his job to confirm that. We've asked him to find out from the customer. He has also refused and said it's not his job.

Apart from the fact that he's completely unhelpful, you'd think if you don't know if a file is Secure or not you wouldn't just... throw them over to other people? My boss hadn't realised this until I pointed that out, so off to his manager we go.

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Chewbecca posted:

Question for goons, over which I'm torn.

If you're required to get some kind of check done for your job (like a police check, working with children check, whatever the equivalent is where you are), when do you think this should happen?

Before I started my current role I had to do a police check which I had to curate stuff for, submit at a registered place, whatever. I did this last year in December for a job starting in January. Obviously in my own time, but not a huge deal.

Since I started, 2 people I work with have either told me, or are in the process of completing those things after they've started or after they've returned from extended leave. I was shocked cos I assumed HR would want it done before you started but I guess nobody checks? And both people used work time to complete this stuff? Probably not more than an hour or two, but still.

So am I the rube for completing this poo poo early on my own time? Or is this perhaps a little bit of piss taking happening?

Oh this is very much dumb poo poo my work does

One of our teams works almost exclusively with secure data. You must have security clearance (UK) to do this. There is some data from our US customers which is apparently a lawless land where they don't give a poo poo who's accessing it, but 90% of the job as it stands is UK which means must have SC clearance.

We keep bringing on contractors who don't have this. The company will pay for the clearance, but they can only start it after you join. It can take months to get the clearance. The company also just... didn't pay the bill for the last round they did, which means we're not allowed to submit anyone new until they do. So we have a QA just sat around doing the tiny amount of US work he can because of this.

In other news I just interviewed someone who went way too far with the "stretch the truth on your CV" thing. I'm generally very much in favour of doing this (and have done it myself), but I would always recommend at least doing some cursory research before the interview so you know enough to say "oh yes I know these basic bits, would need to refresh my knowledge, blah blah blah". This guy though...

"You said you have worked with C#, can you tell me about this?" "No I've not used C#, I reckon I can pick it up in a couple of days though."

"You said you have used this tool, what are your experiences with it?" "Someone I worked with once has used it. I haven't though."

"You said you know this test approach, how have you applied it?" "I read it in a book once."

Like my dude at least give me something!

EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Another day, another interview with someone who's lied so egregiously on their CV that they can't even bullshit their way through softball questions. What's more frustrating is that these applications are supposedly being screened by a recruiter. Our requirements are simple - C#, API, database testing experience. All you need, I'll take someone experienced in another language if they have the other two because the skills are largely translatable.

Today's guy listed he had C# experience but couldn't tell me what a class was. API testing but had never used Postman nor could tell me what a GET request did (and that's the emergency break glass "gently caress this person might not have ever seen an API before" question). He did know how SQL works, at least.

We're now into month 2 of this recruitment process and no signs of actually getting a candidate. Either people applying are perfectly qualified but live 3+ hours away (and we have to be in the office 2 days a week), or don't have the experience they say they do on their CV. We offered one person I used to work with but unfortunately the salary offer was barely over what she's currently making. I am well over 300 CVs now. gently caress.

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EvilHawk
Sep 15, 2009

LIVARPOOL!

Klopp's 13pts clear thanks to video ref

Surprise surprise, one of our best developers handed in his notice today. Asked my boss if it was expected and he's been complaining about his salary for a while. For context since I've been here (coming up to 3 years) the only salary increases they've handed out are to people who are being paid well below their market value, everyone else gets diddly squat. My boss has tried to raise it with HR and they've given nothing back. He's concerned there'll be more in the next few months, which is a shame because most people have been here for years if not decades.

Why yes we are doing a massive recruitment drive and hiring contractors for a year, why do you ask?

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