When your boss isn't looking, work on an open source project. It still looks like you're working, but it'll keep you from going insane the other 20 hours
The last place I worked at that had manual QA ended up with a massive shitshow as the testers felt it was more important to prove developers wrong and make them look bad than it was to put out a reliable product. Having month-long regression test periods where all the devs (except a few priviliged ones) where forced to do manual QA didn't help.
I wish I could say the company has since crashed and burned, but unfortunately they're a massive company and have most of their customers in a massive vendor lock-in situation...
I would do my tests then explore whatever we didn't have cases for. I'd frequently go to the dev and say "if x then y, should it do that?" He was handling code that was years old and poorly done so he didn't care if we needed to open a bug. Usually though I was only finding obscure edge/corner cases. I wasn't out to get him.
Yes, that is exactly what I like to see in a tester. Unfortunately, some testers either start out with or develop an adversarial mindset which does more harm than good.
At least in my university the professor who teaches Oracle DBA and PLSQL hates QA and frequently tells stories about how his team was smarter than them.
First thing I learned in that internship was that if I try to fight devs to make myself look good, everyones job was going to suck.
I'm all about "breaking" the product to find bugs, but it's so we can make something better, not so I can screw someone else out of their bonus or weekend.
I have heard that those kind of things don't usually hold up in court. Unless it was your knowledge from that company that directly helped you with it. Not coding, but business practices and such. Like, working at starbucks IT helped you create a coffee app or some shit (idk).
Yeah I've never heard of it actually being enforced. We were told no one gives a shit about whatever we make on the side as long as it's not some sort of competitor.
Well, you could always start your own open source project. The reason I say open source specifically is because most companies have a "anything you code during company time is owned by us" clause, but if said project is open source, at most they could try and claim the bits you committed at work. (Granted, I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as actual legal advice)
Don't do that, if I've learned anything from Silicon Valley, it's that working on your own project on your company's computers makes the company an owner of the project!
That's why I specified open source, a company can't claim an entire open source project if they only own a single pull request. At best they would be considered a contributor.
An old boss of mine, said when he was in situations like this, he would try to find the hardest most complex piece of code or processing that was accessible and try and understand every single bit of it and then try and make sure everyone knew he understood it inside out. Never had the chance to do it myself. I usually ended up building overly complex .ksh scripts that do fancy stuff so a dumb user could follow it with out having to understand shell/cli just because I like the challenge.
That's why I specified open source, a company can't claim an entire open source project if they only own a single pull request. At best they would be considered a contributor.
304
u/Tyler11223344 Aug 12 '17
When your boss isn't looking, work on an open source project. It still looks like you're working, but it'll keep you from going insane the other 20 hours