A reader asked about interviewing interviewers: “it might be interesting if the person being interviewed were allowed to ask some technical questions of the interviewer.” Yes, you can absolutely ask question of your interviewers. And the best question might not be the stump-the-interviewer questions (in the same way that the stump-the-candidate questions aren’t the best […]
I’ve been at the STAR conference this week, and Cem Kaner’s keynote talk yesterday discussed the idea of extended random regression testing — take all your programmatic tests, and run them in random sequences for a long time. You’ll find defects you cannot find just running the tests by themselves. Here’s the logic behind this
I’m not a big fan of body-of-knowledge based certifications. Testing to someone to detect if they’ve learned the words in books is not adequate to determine actual skill on the job. (Note that there are skill-based certifications, generally from vendors, that appear to be quite useful at detecting if the person is capable of performing
I had a great time in Israel (taught an open-enrollment project management workshop plus a one-day tips and tricks as an onsite), and met up with Israeli bloggers. It was wonderful meeting people with whom I’d corresponded.Now that I’m back on the east coast and recovered from a little jet lag, I’ve been catching up
I’m off to Israel for a week, starting today. If you’d like to meet me for dinner Sunday night, 20:00, contact Roy Osherove. If Sunday doesn’t work for you, send me an email and maybe we can figure something else out. Back to regular blogging tomorrow…
I’m sure you’ve heard conversations like this: Senior Manager: “Candace, I know you said you needed twelve weeks to test this release, but we’re really in a jam. I need you to release sooner. What can you do for me in six weeks?” As much as you might like to say, “Um, not much,” that’s
Seth Godin is one sharp fella. He’s just published a new ebook, BullMarket: Companies That Can Help You Make Something Happen. I’m thrilled to be part of the Seth’s “unscientific listing blogs” section, along with Hal Macomber and Clarke Ching. I’m flattered to be part of BullMarket. And I recommend you read Free Prize
If you’re a hiring manager and you haven’t started using a blog to help people find you, consider it. Right now, there are still tons of great technical people looking for jobs, but it’s hard to find just the right candidates. And, I’ve been reading articles in the popular press that say we’ll have a
I exchanged email with a graduate student recently, who’s just starting to think about what she wants to do when she graduates. Since she’s about a year away from graduation, this is a great time to start thinking. She originally thought she might want to work with teams who maintain software systems. I commented that
I’ve also been writing intermittently on the Job and HR blogs. I don’t cross-reference the blog postings here, so look for different posts there. I haven’t been writing a lot in those blogs due to my work schedule, but that seems to be working out.