It's a harsh world for QA engineers, apparently

During a phone screen the other day, a QA candidate expressed to me some degree of shock and amazement that, upon finding a bug, he would be able to "talk to the engineer and maybe look at some code" to try and understand the issue.

I'm probably just hopeless naive, I know, but I in turn expressed some degree of shock and amazement that any functional and productive team in 2007 would do it any other way.

From all the QA candidates I've talked to, I'm getting the clear impression that the working conditions for QA engineers and testers are pretty bleak. A lot of them do sprint after sprint for faceless contracting agencies, many of them are kept in isolated testing farms away from the "real" engineers doing the "real" work, some are given insufficient resources to test with, and a few have even told me that they feel the data the collect and report up is not considered of significant value to the project.

Sheesh.

Advice for job seekers

I'm doing some hiring right now and am having the dubious pleasure of plowing through a lot of resumes and doing a lot of phone screens. As always, Joel Spolsky has lots of useful things to say on the topic, but let me offer a few additional suggestions to the would-be job seeker.

• Put your complete contact info on the resume. Name, address, email address, phone number, lat/lon, and whatever else you can supply me. You might have written a truly masterful cover letter, but it got dropped when the HR department just sent me a PDF copy of your actual resume. Sorry, but them's the breaks. Burden's on you.
  

• When I find a resume I like, I email the candidate to set up a phone screen. We will agree on a date and time, and then I will call you at that time. This means you need to be waiting by the phone and ready to talk when I call. If you're not available for some reason, fine -- things do happen, I understand -- but the burden is on you to send me a note ASAP and explain and reschedule. I'm not going to spend my time hunting you down.

• When we talk on the phone, one of the first things I'm going to say is "have you had a chance to look at our website and see what we do here?" If you say "no", you're down one strike and we haven't even gotten to your experience or skills yet. If you say "yes" and then show no comprehension about what you've read, you're also down one strike. I'd much rather have you say "yes, but I'm not familiar with the Mugwump market and so I wonder if you can explain to me what your FrobNitz product actually can do for me" -- that's great, let's have a dialog, no problem. But don't try to bluff.

More on this later.

A new market for JP2

I reproduce the following item, verbatim, which was picked up on one of my Google Alerts from some random website:

Techdepot.com LTB Audio Systems, Inc. today announced that their popular, award winning, True 5.1 Surround Sound USB Headphone of details; eradicates JPEG/JPEG 2000 compression artifacts; sharpens and corrects edges without overshooting and noise

Huh?

The Toyota Way

From a recent New York Times magazine article on Toyota and The Toyota Way, on their approach to designing the new Tundra pickup truck:

When I spoke not long ago with the Tundra’s chief engineer, Yuichiro Obu, and its project manager, Mark Schrage, both of whom work in Ann Arbor, they characterized their research for the Tundra as quite unlike what was done for the Sienna. For starters, designing a full-size pickup truck for the American worker is more complex than designing a van for a soccer mom. The way a farmer uses a truck is different from the way a construction worker does; preferences in Texas (for two-wheel drive) differ from those in Montana (for four-wheel drive). Truck drivers have diverse needs in terms of horsepower and torque, since they carry different payloads on different terrain. They also have variable needs when it comes to cab size (seating between two and five people) and fuel economy (depending on the length of a commute). In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By asking them face to face about their needs, Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; by silently observing them at work, they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver. Finally, they made archaeological visits to truck graveyards in Michigan, where they poked around the rusting hulks of pickups and saw what parts had lasted. With so many retired trucks in one place, they also gained a better sense of how trucks had evolved over the past 30 years — becoming larger, more varied, more luxurious — and where they might go next.

Excellent.

NGA endorsement of JPIP

NGA's latest missive on GEOINT standards specifically calls out "A Promising Standards Application -- JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol (JPIP)" (see page 15).

[note they seemed to have inadvertently chopped the last paragraph right as they were getting into the good OGC bits, oh well]