Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 104: Interviews With VPs and Hiring a Tester

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I went through the interview process, and as last step I had an interview with the VP of engineering. At the end of interview he asked if I had any questions for him. I didn’t know what to ask. What do you ask? I’m a front-end web developer on a SCRUM team. Our Product Owner is also our tester, but she has a very busy schedule and she hardly has any time to test anymore. My team thinks we need a second product owner, but I think we should hire a dedicated tester to help the PO. How do I convince my team and my manager to hire a tester instead of a second product owner? We don’t work with scripted test plans or anything, so I think a dedicated tester would be a huge benefit to our team and our deliverables.

It takes more than great combinatoric skills to be a great software engineer. This is episode 104 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a podcast where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development. Oh man, I suck today. Thank you, Jameson.

We also, we have some Patreons, some Patrons. one day i'll say it's their fault for making up a stupid nonsense word patreons is not a word and i want it to be we have some patrons that we want to thank for supporting our podcast that's uh ken howard sean clayton and dustin coats thank you all for supporting at such a high level and we really appreciate everyone else's support too if you want to help support the show you can go to patreon.com soft skills eng or you can find a link on our website there and it'll help keep us supported it'll help pay for hosting and design and and other fun things that make the experience better for y'all thank you very much all right we have a couple of

questions today i think yeah do you want me to read the first one yeah why don't you go ahead this is from a listener named mark i went through the interview process and as a last step i had an interview with the vp of engineering at the end of the interview he asked if i had any questions for him i didn't know what to ask what do you ask oh what do you ask a vp of oh that's a question you could ask the vp of engineering yeah okay you could get meta yeah i like that if you were me what would you ask you how much money should i ask for what's the most amount of money i could ask yeah what's the maximum number

perfect why don't we ask that that's kind of ridiculous we don't ask yeah maybe i'll try that actually i did try that last time and it didn't work what did they say they said a bunch of words that meant i'm not going to tell you you need to come up with a number they said a bunch of words that meant i'm better at negotiating than you try again yeah so uh i play a dungeons and dragons game with some some friends around here we play every couple weeks usually and last night we were negotiating to purchase a horse and the negotiating tactic that was used was one of the characters told really boring stories until the shopkeeper just like gave up fine maybe maybe that's what you could try it was based around tea and all the varieties of tea and

all the methods of preparing tea and then branched out into all the different kinds of leaves and plants and just like flora in general and i guess what i'm saying is try to roll a dice and if the number on the dice is high then you just show it to them and you say i passed my skill check uh so you gotta you gotta bump that number up you gotta pony up buddy yeah well why don't you just start by asking how much the vp makes yeah exactly say i would like one dollar more than that please oh man i don't know have you ever been in a situation where you're talking to some leader in in the company you're interviewing for and they're like do you have any questions for me

oh yeah i feel like nope well no i don't sometimes in my head i think nope but also in my head i think the point of this is to get a job and saying nope doesn't help me get a job so i'll just think of stuff that makes me sound smart to ask sometimes yeah in fact asking no question is probably worse than asking dumb questions at this point yeah i think so and this is a pretty common no questions i actually i have one question where's the door i have i have asked no questions when i just really did not want the job at all yeah so it was a way of shortening the interview but yeah this is a pretty common thing i think to meet with a higher up boss person maybe even higher up than you would deal with normally in your day-to-day yes it feels like they just kind

of like to spot check the interviews and i don't even know if there's a standard thing they're looking for across companies but it's just like they just want to swoop in and make sure your face doesn't cause them horrible pain or i don't know some kind of sanity check oh the vp engineering vetoed another candidate because the face caused pain actually there was one that was pretty technical and i did some whiteboarding but most of them have just been like chatting about the business and the team and things that that person knows about yep dave i know you have some questions i want to hear them i wrote down some really great questions okay but i feel like it would be unfair just to read them all out loud so okay you want to intersperse them through our discussion

no instead i just want to ask you these questions and i want you to give the best answer you can think of okay yeah so number one how far away is the earth from the sun in smuts um so i know with 100 certainty that a smut is a unit of measurement uh based on platinum ounces and when pounded down into coins they're they're pretty small so i'm gonna say it's several hundred trillion Smoots away. You gotta stack all those Smoots. You are off by a few

orders of magnitude. No, a Smoot is the height of a professor Smoot from MIT and the students one year measured the length of the Mass Ave bridge in Smoots and then wrote it down on the bridge. It's like 340.2 Smoots long plus or minus one year.

But the sun. Oh right, yeah, so the sun uh is 93 million miles away from earth on average and so converting 93 million miles to smootes uh it's a lot of smootes more than several hundred trillion smootes no less than that i think oh okay i was okay i was too high i think it's in the billions well i mean i thought i thought smoot was a shorter man i guess yeah i mean you thought he was the size of a pounded coin yeah yeah which is pretty short okay um so you got that one wrong okay that was the bad question to ask you're not doing so great because it made me look bad okay that was a good example

of what not to do in an interview trivia off the table all right next question who do i have to know to get around oh dang it i screwed it up well you're over two okay who do i have to know to get ahead around here that's the question i mean i think you need to know a man named dave uh he knows everything he runs everything he's always right get on his good side and you'll go far all right that's all i wanted to know okay last question which way is the door so i can leave now it moved since you first walked in the room we have like a inception situation it's on the ceiling now also we have a different door for candidates who will be given a job offer from those who have been rejected yeah it's like the cartoon style trapdoor under your feet

where's the nearest door right under you beep whoosh we've sent our drones they're on their way to pick you up um yeah i i don't think i really have approached this very deliberately in the past i feel like if the interview's gone well i'm usually pretty comfortable by that point so this part goes well too and if it's gone poorly then it doesn't matter so i don't care that much i've never felt enormous pressure i feel like to like nail the the boss of my boss style interview but now that i'm thinking about it it feels like i mean one of one of the goals is to get you the job right assuming you want it so there there are questions you could ask that make it clear that you're

interested and that you're engaged and you care about the problem space and you want to help and all kinds of stuff like that i mean asking about like the business and financials and and future plans and things that this type of person might know about and think about i think would would help with that and then there's also just questions that will help you figure out if you want the job that this person might be able to answer they might not be the best person actually because they don't, it's not like they know much about your day-to-day work if there are a few levels above you. Yeah. I was going to say the style of question I like to ask here is the kind of question that you ask yourself after having started a new job, maybe you're a couple months in

and you say to yourself, boy, I wish I had known X before I started. And so if you can kind of get those questions out of the interviewer before you start the job, you can make a more informed decision like boy i wish i had known that this team was actually the team that sweeps the kitchen floor every night you know like and not the one that writes code are you likely to get a straight answer to that kind of question though or i guess well hopefully you know the answer to that but it i mean a question i could i could think of is like how good is my manager you know like i probably interviewed with them but you know several of the managers and where do you rank them compared to the other ones and i don't think they would i don't think i don't think you would get an honest

answer to that one but yeah it's like this weird it has to be all of our managers are wonderful sensitive what's that all of the managers are wonderful yeah exactly i can't possibly choose between my children i love them all the same i would rank them all in first place yeah they're stack ranked um sideways it's more of a q ranking no it's yeah it's more of a uh like a hash table ranking and they're all in the first bucket um i think you can ask questions like tell me about what the different groups in the organization do where how are the responsibilities broken down and you can get a sense for who does what what's the more important work what's the uh what's the grunt work you know and um i think it's really helpful to try to get a a sense for

where you're going to fit into the organization when you if you take the job yeah and you you might be able to derive from that some of the answers to the questions that you know about i wish i had known this before i started yeah yeah i like the idea of asking about bigger picture things because that's likely to be on their mind more than what what bug was fixed recently or something like that yep um a question i usually ask is what how will i know if i'm being successful or what would what would i do that would make it me successful to you you know yeah just great great question what are they looking for kind of thing uh i've gotten some really waffly answers to that though sometimes it's just like you'll just crush it you'll just be killing it all the

time 24 7 non-stop crushing okay well you just learned something about that leader yeah i like to ask what keeps them up at night what are some of your biggest concerns and worries like about life or work no about work like what about what about the breakdown of civil disagreement in our discourse today in the united states of america um i like to ask what makes your team unique like what are some of the unique strong points that you see in your team that other engineering teams don't have and by the way if you get a dodgy answer to some of these questions or a non-answer that in and of itself is an answer and the answer may very well be oh this person hasn't thought about that question much

and that's a data point you know that that's useful information don't just write that off as oh not applicable it's applicable yeah i think if i did this again i would just be curious what their day-to-day is like and i don't know that that would necessarily help me or make me look better or worse for the job but just like what do you do all day as a vp of engineering you know like yeah it probably depends on the size of your organization a lot but i like to ask them like tell me about some of the highlights of your work here what are you most proud of what are some of the great things that have happened in your time at this company uh that'll give you a sense for what they value and what what makes them tick which i think is really cool yeah that's a good

one i think you need to take the opportunity to give them a very direct hard to refuse invite to a social event at your house having a little get together with some friends i'd really like it if you could be there what do you say what are you measuring here like their social gracefulness if they're gonna be your friend or not by coming over to your house yeah you're probably measuring their ability to say no without offending you i'm gonna have a little get together with my friends tomorrow night can you bring the oven baked turkey yeah okay first before you do this you need to talk to the sales people and just learn sales real quick and then you need to turn this into a sales pitch to have this person come

like grill some steaks or whatever i don't know crochet some scarves at your house i like that okay well i think we pretty much have covered the full breadth of possible questions you could ever want to ask a vp of engineering yeah pretty much good luck your your job now is to determine determine which of these questions are real and which ones were just for comedic effect they're probably like well none of these were funny so i assume they're all real okay we gotta get out of here next question all right i'll read this one okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a front-end web developer on a scrum team

our product owner is also our tester but she has a very busy schedule and she hardly has any time to test anymore my team thinks we need a second product owner but i think we should hire a dedicated tester to help the product owner how do i convince my team and my manager to hire a tester instead of a second product owner we don't work with scripted test plans or anything so i think a dedicated tester would be a huge benefit to our team and our deliverables i like this question because there's one question which is how do i convince my team to do this thing i want to do and underneath it is a question that i actually thought it was which is what about testing or how should we test stuff or should i hire a tester right yeah yeah this is this is

interesting to me i have been at places that had manual dedicated qa people and i've been at places that didn't and i feel like i feel like the quality was pretty similar in both places or both of these situations but in the the environments where developers were responsible for the quality of their own work um there was a lot more ownership interesting in what way um i mean it's really hard as a human to not throw something over the fence to testing when it's someone else's job to test your stuff i see so i mean you you pay lip service to like yeah we'll we'll test it i'll make sure it's tested before i put it in whatever environment this this tester uses it but it's it's there's just a safety net there that lets you get away with

stuff and i think it's the incentives are pretty strong to push you away from uh building for i mean the the the lowest level is just like test it manually yourself and then it goes up from there around automation and process and eliminating the need to manually test as much okay so on one side of the spectrum you have a strong ownership argument and on the other side of the spectrum you have software without bugs just kidding yeah i wish i slept more than two hours last night because I want to say stuff and it's not coming out. Basically, I'm skeptical that hiring another tester will solve problems more effectively

than having the team own the quality of their code and put and invest into that instead of just put another person on it. I think implicit in this question is an assumption that I want to challenge, which is that the product owner has to do the testing. the question says the product owner has a very busy schedule and hardly has any time to test anymore which tells me that the product owner maybe used to be the primary qa for the team

and in my experience the product owner should not be doing qa or testing they should be validating that what the engineers built matches their expectation but they should not be like exploring every corner case and and validating that every little feature works according to the spec you know what i'm you know what i'm saying yeah that's what i was trying to say and i hope with a good night's sleep i i would have been able to say it oh i'm sure you would have yeah i totally agree with you i i assume that this is how the team was set up so at some point someone decided this is how it worked but i i agree that's not ideal i think sometimes the product owner steps in because no one else is stepping up

and they feel like they're the last barrier between developers and the real world. So no one else is doing it. I guess I will. Or maybe some bugs have slipped through in the past and the product owner is like, I'm going to make sure no more bugs slip through. Yeah, exactly.

In both of those scenarios, there is an ownership problem. Someone has failed to own QA because it should not be the product owner's job to make sure bugs don't slip through to production. That is an engineering function, in my opinion. And whether you have a dedicated tester or not, it shouldn't be up to the product owner to do that for you.

Yeah. The other thing is scripted test plans. And that's definitely a thing and it has a place. But to me, it feels like there's not a lot of tooling or infrastructure around testing. So just putting another person on it. I have seen that in practice where there's just a lot of people manually running through stuff without a ton of infrastructure and it doesn't scale very well. and adding more people doesn't increase the quality very much and it also increases the

communication overhead quite a bit so i feel like no matter what you do investing in tooling and processes is helpful i think a lot of this depends on the kind of software that you're building in my experience if you're building internal software used by the company employees or back-end services that can be inherently tested through automation uh you know fully tested through automation you may not need dedicated qa people but if you're building like consumer facing or external customer facing ui and stuff like that i have found that a dedicated qa person or team can make a big difference in the quality of the software but in every case oh yeah oh yeah for sure but in every case um i've noticed ownership goes down a little bit just like you you know

and i think what happens is the test burden is so onerous sometimes like okay we support seven browser versions and on different operating systems things behave differently or whatever it is and someone's got to own the monotonous process of testing that whether it's through automation or manual and you just for whatever reason engineers don't generally do that and and so when you hand it off to another team i've noticed uh the engineers say well you know what i'm going to test it in chrome on my macbook pro and i'll just see what comes out of qa you know yeah so i don't think this is a slam dunk argument and so uh to answer the question in here which is how do i convince my team well you better have some pretty compelling evidence because i think you'll

know what you'll find is that uh it's hard to make a strong case with concrete supporting facts for either approach yeah the the product owner doing all the testing really just leaves a bad taste in my mouth that just seems bad yeah me too it seems like a like some scar tissue built up around pain but not an effective way to operate and not scalable for sure as you're already seeing and so i guess i could see why hiring another person to do the testing to take that off your product owner's plate is appealing but i mean your product owner is super busy but she also knows the product super well which probably makes her a pretty effective tester and hiring a new person they won't know the product at all there's a there'll be a pretty big ramp up could be for

them to get effective with it i i do think i don't know i just feel like developers are the the best at testing their stuff i mean there's there's some like there's a debate raging in my heart because part of me wants to say like just do more integration tests and the other part is for me is like but integration tests are horrible they're so painful it's the the trade-off the it's not the trade-off the tipping point where they start to hurt more than they help i feel like is a lot lower for integration tests than other kinds of tests can i just say that i love it when debates rage in your heart oh it's just the best yeah it is you love it when debates rage in my heart yes i just love i love the heart rage debates

that go on inside you can you hear it through the microphone i can like feel the heat coming off my headphones when that happens it's so cool yeah cool so let me let me pose pretty good let me pose this question a slightly different way from the way the question asker asked it so the the question is our po is too busy to do all the testing jameson and i have said categorically that sounds wrong your po should not be responsible for quality not be the only person responsible for quality but secondly if you do hire a second product owner and you task that product owner with qa i think there's a good chance that product owner will be gone in about six months because typically when people apply for a product owner position they're doing they

want to be a product designer or product manager or something else not a qa person not doing verification or regression testing yeah so that makes sense i think you need to decide first who owns qa in this organization and of course the answer is we all own it well now you need to decide like what what slice of the qa pie is engineering responsible for before delivering anything to the product owner and after you've answered that question then it might become obvious whether you need to hire a manual tester or another product owner and you know if the product owner is busy doing product owner things then that's fine and if they need two people to do that, that's fine. But I would not hire a QA person to offload the product owner just as a

matter of course. I'm confused. I feel like you just contradicted yourself. Well, that's pretty normal. You said don't hire another product owner and tell them to do QA, but also don't hire just a QA person. So I'm sorry that I've confused you. I was just trying to get your heart to go into another. I'm easily confused right now. It's probably not your fault. Now I don't even remember what I wanted to say i think the the crux of it is you've got one you got to go one layer lower into the abstraction here and solve that question of who owns qa first um and it better not be your product owner and the sub question there is is it going to be engineers only or are we going to have a qa person that helps to do the qa function before we hand things to the product owner as complete

yeah i like it good advice dave also if you're a startup just go raise another 90 million dollars and hire like 20 product owners you know should be no problem yeah that should be fine and then it turns out you'll have you will have 20 products yep perfect that means more sales and you can all retire yeah that's usually how it goes with startups yep that's pretty much that's the formula it's like question mark question mark question mark raise funding hire product owners sail off into the sunset exactly i don't want to make it sound like i am belittling the role of product owners they're great it's also part of my role right now so they are me and when are you going to sail into the sunset i'm already in the sunset

when you're gonna join me i thought you're gonna say after the question marks i don't know all right have we answered the question pretty much i mean as far as i can tell i mean i i would need a lot more detail here to really go into this but and i would love to sit down with this team and be like how did you get to where you are today i mean i think that would be such an awesome story yeah you know and i would love to hear the product owner's side i mean she'd probably be like well the engineers let a bunch of bugs through so i picked up the slack you know i mean maybe not i don't want to i don't want to belittle the engineering team either or it could just be a simple misunderstanding like oh i thought that's what the role of product

owner was supposed to do you know and and i actually don't like it when people say that's the product owner is supposed to do which is what i spent the last 15 minutes saying because frankly it may not work for every team the same way right yeah so there you go cool well question answered where can people go if they want to get their own questions answered they can go to softskills.audio and then click the ask a question button and uh fill out our handy google form they if they if they've gotten their question answered or just had their spirits lifted by listening they can also click the where is it the support us on the giant green support us on patreon button

um and that will take you to a website whose name is made up and not a real word where you can uh you can support us and we would really appreciate that yes thank you very much and i also want to just send out a big thank you to the 56 people who have submitted ratings for us a whole bunch of five-star ratings oh wow we're very appreciative of that yeah thank you i haven't checked those in a while yeah me either so thank you very much we appreciate that that that actually helps people find our show a little bit better in the search results we think there's a bunch of i'm sure there's a bunch of like magical machine learning ranking algorithms going on but we think that oh you mean mechanical turk yeah you mean someone gets paid a penny to drag things around in a

or something that's exactly right so thank you yeah thank you so much all right with that we will catch you next week all right thank you