Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 290: Past offers and from QA to PM

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I wanted to know if listing past offers (as a brand name signal) on your resume will help or hurt you during the resume screening and interview stages? I am an SQA engineer at one of the FAANGS, and I feel inadequate in my position; I get the gist QAs are not valued much. Essentially I got into this domain early in my career, and I find moving out of this role difficult. My long-term goal is to get into a PM role. Is that even possible, or should I first switch to the Dev role to build a better foundation? Help me. I am lost.

it takes more than saying we're trying to cultivate a culture of learning as an excuse for bad tooling to be a great engineer this is episode 290 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development like how to change that fixed mindset into a growth mindset That's what you say whenever someone complains about how horrible your deploy tooling is. Say you have a fixed mindset?

Yeah, you don't have a culture of learning. Wait, I thought that's the opposite of what this was saying, is that you have to have bad tools in order to have a culture of learning. Yeah, okay. Well, yes, I agree. Let's move on before anyone thinks about what I said. This episode is sponsored by Hired,

which is the best way for engineers to find their next job. and you will hear more about them later all right would you like me to read out loud all the names and emojis that we got this week yes okay these folks are contributing on patreon and they get shouted out every week they are andrew pollack the yeet your job podcast avery sterzy ian walter arun dhuna kashaktan ohio cameron hall ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadiyi karen spainson will angel regner hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes john grant i bought winrar nick kantar and philip john basile if you'd like to join these folks you can go to soft skills.audio and click

the support us on patreon button and any dollar amount you contribute will get you access to our slack community where you can chat and hear about all kinds of interesting and weird things that happen at people's jobs that is we haven't talked enough about that that is a great feature yeah it's nice to have a show built around the idea of quitting your job because it's so fun to gripe about jobs yeah it's true all right should i read our first question go for it this is from a listener j just the letter j who asks i wanted to know if listing past offers as a brand name signal on your resume will help or hurt you during the resume screening or interview stages ah you kind of keep a little collection like like a collection of trophies yeah how would you prove

it. And I guess how do you prove anything on your resume? People just kind of read it and assume that's what happened. And don't anyone go and mess that up because I'm very happy with that in our industry. No one break the social contract of never checking references. Yes. Ruin it for all of us. I'll just say only put 90% true stuff on your resume. That's about my bar. Not my personal bar but if you keep it above 90 i'll be happy with you as a candidate i have way higher standards than that dave oh yeah where you at just 100 it's gonna be true okay i want to know if listing past offers will help or hurt you it am i screening your resume because it would hurt you this would be a huge red flag because you didn't work there who cares if you got it feels very

snooty i was offered a position by a little company called google you might have heard of it i am really good at interviewing yeah i mean you didn't do anything there so what the skills there there is some overlap between good at computers and got an offer at google it's not one-to-one for sure and you have no accomplishments to demonstrate from that yes you do have you ever interviewed at google that is an accomplishment to get an offer i mean it kind of is i guess like that's that's what you've proved you've proved you can pass the google interview yeah that takes some doing too yeah but the fact that you that someone would feel like that is a signal to the same level of here's what i did the past few years at this other job uh tells me that we don't see

work the same way i guess i see okay but let me okay let me let me take the other side i've also never passed an interview at google okay well the truth comes out could be just a bit of jealousy you're just oh boy well okay how about how about i let me take a different angle on this and see how you react what if this person is just trying to save you time like look interviewing takes a long time you have to make hard decisions you might even have an argument with your co-workers about me i'm gonna save you all that time and say i got an offer from these other three companies so you should give me an offer too there's some FOMO there that's true you don't want to be the only company not on this list right yeah if we say no to you if we wait a minute hmm if i say

yes to you but with a gentleman's agreement that you agree to decline my offer i'm going to go on this list and then you're going to farm that list around and spread my my brand it's like free marketing ah okay so i think we've talked about developer influencers before but this is a new avenue to developerly influence you you associate names on a resume spread that around it's perfect this this feels a lot like a i have this this very desirable like significant other that you don't know because they go to another school but trust me like i yeah i i totally convinced them to date me yeah it just feels just feels a little desperate yeah it does it does feel desperate it also i so even though i was kind of playing the other side for a minute i agree with you jameson

it's uh it's just kind of a weird signal and if there's anything i'm good at it's picking up on things that don't follow the social norms and conform to society's expectations uh and ruthlessly just pruning out anything yes that's not exactly average yeah yeah nothing authentic it's like the line in the lego movie where wild style is asking the character played by chris bratt whose name i can't remember emmet asking emmet you know what's your favorite restaurant he's like any chain restaurant i'm gonna try and be take a different interpretation of this question okay what if what if you don't have a resume right like what if you're new to the industry you don't have a lot of previous experience or other signals to back it up okay i i mean maybe maybe this is what you

got you just interviewed a bunch of places i mean if you're new to the industry and you have a bunch of offers you should probably just take some of those offers i mean it's so hard right to get that first job you've got an offer take it look it's almost like it's almost like when a company makes a bunch of profits and rather than pocketing the profits or paying investors they reinvest it in the company you're like i'm an interviewer or i'm getting interviewed i got an offer rather than take this offer i'm gonna reinvest it into my next offer yeah it's like those people that trade the paperclip into a house yes i'm gonna take this offer it's a mid-market company and leverage it into an offer at a big company and then at the end you are the general chairperson

of the un yes i turned this offer into president of earth oh my goodness but yeah like so here's what i would say i i have to assume that you're talking about super past offer like offers from a year or two ago three years ago whatever if you have a current offer don't write it on your resume but do use it to negotiate a better offer from the company you're talking to now that's absolutely goes without saying it just doesn't go on your resume i i think that's just weird and people won't know what to do with that information yeah i mean we did joke a little bit about like oh you wouldn't want to be different but there is if especially if you're submitting a resume that that is a machine finely tuned to pull out things that look different for better or for worse and

lots of people are unfairly disadvantaged by that but you don't want to make yourself opt into being unfairly disadvantaged. It's already unfair enough. Yeah, exactly. Don't tilt the tables even more against you. Yeah. You want a real beige looking resume. Vanilla, just plain as can be. Yes. Okay. Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck with this. Love that you're thinking out of the box. There's probably some other crazy things you could do instead that would make you stand out in unique and fun ways. Hey, Jameson, have you heard about the great resignation is it that charles dickens book wait no the entire population on earth has started taking our advice of quit your job oh yes that's right apparently we have achieved

influencer status we've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs and now we want to tell you how to do it we're ready to reveal the secret i mean you don't just walk out shooting finger guns yes well you do that first but after you do that there's a new service we want to tell you about called Hired. What is Hired, Dave? Hired is the biggest AI-driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies. It is a great way to find your next job. I've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular, and I've never seen anything like Hired. Tell me about what you're seeing. So I've interviewed about 150 people in the last year, and I am serious. Every candidate that's come to me through Hired has multiple

offers, and they're incredibly high, scary high, like 30% higher than other candidates. is that before after the finger guns yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check out hired okay do you want to read our next question dave yes i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am an sqa engineer i think that stands for software quality assurance at one of the fangs that's facebook amazon apple netflix google and sometimes microsoft it's like it's like the vowels are a e i o u and sometimes y it's like microsoft is the sometimes m okay

continuing to read and i feel inadequate in my position i get the gist that qas are not valued much essentially i got into this domain early in my career and i find moving out of this role difficult. My long-term goal is to get into a PM role. Is that even possible? Or should I first switch to a dev role to build a better foundation? Help me, I am lost. That's an interesting question. So here's the benefit of moving to a dev role. I think there are plenty of developers who look at QA and PM and think that's really easy and I could just do that. So you get to join that crowd and maybe you won't even want to be a PM anymore because you'll be like in the superior snooty developer role now if you take the intermediate step of developers are

you saying yeah yeah i mean maybe you'll discover it's really a step much higher than the lowly pm role oh yeah yeah that's interesting i mean i feel like there's it depends on the role but there's some amount i have not been a quality assurance engineer i have done some quality assurance as part of being an engineer i've also not done a lot of quality insurance as part of being an engineer would you say the amount of quality assurance that you haven't done is a little greater than the amount of quality assurance you have done oh probably i've i'm probably a senior don't do quality assurance engineer that's the level of not quality assurance i do yeah so so i can't speak to that experience directly but there are lots of dev

roles that kind of overlap with pm a little bit i feel like this could be a triangle or it could be a a hierarchy where okay pm is at the top and then dev is at the middle and then qa is at the bottom so pm says build this thing and dev builds it and qa figures out if it's broken or not and then dev would get you one step closer to pm so that might be useful or it could be a triangle where pm and dev work together to figure out what to build and also pm and qa work together because qa has to understand like what they're trying to build to be able to test it well and then dev and QA also work together because they need to make sure they're in agreement on requirements and expectations and stuff. And then you're just moving to a different, is that a vertex, different

vertex, different points at the triangle. And you're not really close or you're just in a different role. I kind of, I'm starting to form this visual of one of those funny Venn diagrams where it's like Yoda, the rock and president Obama. They're like different intersections of those three people. Have you ever seen one of those? Is that a real one? That is a real one. think it is it's amazing yoda the rock obama i just found a know your meme page this is yobama oh i've got a picture for you to see oh no it's not i was wrong it's not it is yoda obama and thanos yoda obama okay and the middle is yobamas so anyway okay this is like dev product manager qa in the middle okay so this isn't based on attributes it's literally just like smush their

names and some part of what they look like together it's like photoshop them into into into one piece or you know merge anyway i don't know there's like no way to visually explain this picture just imagine thanos with yoda ears in a suit anyway is that very charismatic and eloquent yeah exactly is this what you're trying to describe it's something like this my life is better because i've seen that now i can't remember what we were talking about i think i had a different approach i think i was thinking of something different but you were talking about pathways triangles between dev qa and pm ah okay i was thinking about smashing the metric metaphor or symbol i guess here's what i think i

wish more product managers had a background in qa i think that would be awesome all the edge case thinking that that software test engineers do oh man so good i would love product to come with that stuff prepared how do you make it happen i'm just trying to think of the qa people i've worked with and i feel like they've all had some amount of feedback about the product because yeah often They often use it in ways that people weren't thinking about when they designed it or tried to create the features or the requirements. That's kind of the job description. Yeah, hopefully they do that because that is true. That is their job.

I mean, is it just you just walk up to someone and make that pitch? You say, I think a lot about requirements and I'll think even better if that's my job full time. Yeah, I don't know. And truth be told, I've never seen a QA person go into the product management realm ever. I don't know. I've probably worked with like 50 of them, and I've never seen it. But if I were in your shoes, what I would probably suggest is ask the product manager if you can PM one of the smaller projects to get your feet wet and try it out in like a prototype. And you can tell them, like, look, I'm not going to take your job yet.

but but i want to i just want to i want to see if this is a great career option for me can i can i try it out maybe you could mentor me and we'll tell the team like hey you know qa person over here is gonna pm this particular part of the product i think that'd be great give it a try see if you like it i think that'd be a great way to do it now at a fang company it might be a little tricky you probably don't sit at the lunch table with the product people yeah probably not and i maybe you do. You probably have access to a product person. Probably have different colored badges. That's probably true. Which means you cannot associate. Oh, sorry. This is a blue badge table. But nothing speaks more than experience. And so finding creative ways to get experience

will help you move into that role. And it could very well be that your company is just not set up to help people transition that way. I know my previous company, which was one of the fangs, That was absolutely possible to do, you know, moving between roles. I saw it all the time, in and out of PM, in and out of management, in and out of engineering development,

all the time. But every time it was like, okay, you want to become an X, great. We're not going to make the paper change. In other words, we're not going to make the change on paper yet, but do X for six months and then report back

and we'll see how you did. And that was like a necessary step to do that kind of thing. I had two thoughts and one was good and one was dumb. and i feel like they're both gone okay i i like the thing you just said because it sounds so reasonable i feel like sometimes there is a maybe a feeling of guilt that you're trying to abandon your current role and and maybe you don't want to let people know that you're you're not satisfied

with the thing that you're doing right now but i think it would be pretty reasonable to just say hey i i would love to do more of this kind of work and and kind of let people know that you want to try it out and and i think the reaction is probably going to be pretty pretty supportive most of the time yeah i agree oh okay i thought of my dumb thing yes so as a qa person i could be just totally misunderstanding what the role is but you you do hold some power over the success or failure of the project manager's project and you have that the ability to use it as leverage what a nice roadmap you've got there it'd be a shame if none of it passed qa and it never shipped maybe i could help you maybe maybe adjust the requirements a little bit or take on a little

bit of the product work to make it easier to qa and and make that process smoother and then you just have extorted them into letting you take on some of the pm work perfect and if i ever say anything i always say extort your way to to what you want and it never goes wrong and you'll never regret it or be the subject of a cautionary tale and you never go to jail and you never go to jail No, it's a long phrase. And sometimes I forget the order, but that is a phrase I say all the time. Perfect. So I will say that just one way to answer this question is that if you just want to get out of QA, which I'm reading between the lines that might be there, you know, it's like, just help me go somewhere. A really good and natural stepping stone is to move into test automation.

You go from doing manual QA, which you're very good at and skilled, and you know how to really exercise a software system, put it through its paces. Take that to the next level, which is automating yourself out of a job. And companies love automated QA. They love it. Isn't that what a, I mean, they say they're a software quality assurance engineer. So I kind of assume that's what they're doing already, that they're doing some amount of, not just, not just, I'm not trying to make it sound lowly. I choose not to assume that, Jameson. I'm sorry. Oh, okay. Well, you're being more intellectually open than I am. Closing myself off to the possibility that this is a software quality assurance engineer who clicks through test

cases by hand. There you go. You were, yes. Thank you for acknowledging how closed-minded that interruption was. I'm sorry. Get back to it. Okay. So what I'll just say that if you happen to be a manual tester, which is my assumption at this moment, then test automation is a great path to step up out. I don't even want to say up. These are valuable roles. But if you want to get out of it, that's one stepping stone that will start you on the path. If you're already into test automation, then you might just have to quit this job and go get a new one as a developer. But I've seen that happen a lot. A lot of folks who are doing test automation move into development, application development, feature development. I've seen that often. In fact, it's one of the reasons why it's

so hard to hire a test automator because they do that job for a little while and then they so often jump over into software development yeah that is a pretty well-worn path not that it's easy i'm sure there are plenty of people who would like to do it but can't but yeah i have seen that pattern happen a lot should i switch to a dev role to build a better foundation so so say they try to get into it from a qa background it doesn't work what about does that mean they should just move to a dev role as the next step is it is it going to be easier is it going to be easier like easier meaning what do you mean easier to get into a pm role from a developer role yes i don't know i mean i guess maybe i'll just have to rely on the raw numbers here statistically speaking i've seen

plenty of developers go into pm roles but i've never seen a qa person go into a pm role therefore the answer to your question is objectively yes it is easier to do that than the other. Okay. You should be the first though. You should pioneer this. Yeah. Or be the first that Dave has heard of. Also a good thing to do. You could pioneer that in my own mind. Yes. I think your pitch was great about how deeply you think about requirements and edge cases. That sounds solid to me. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Good luck. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button.

And thank you so much to everyone who has done that. We really appreciate all the questions that come in. Every week, you are the lifeblood of this show. All right, thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.