"You never talk about your brother!", I was told yesterday as I mentioned I have a lovely brother who is a developer, just a little younger than me that he always needs to keep on competing with me and never quite catch up and who just do happens to work at the same company as I do.
We don't really work together. Work gives me just as much excuses to call him up as the fact that we're related, and both require conscious effort. My brother is lovely, and really really good developer. He works with identity management systems and I work with end-point protection, so he's on a component and I'm on a product. Recently, he's on a component that has been failing a lot in production and that gets easily blamed even when it isn't, and some of the illusions around that are so much easier to address because I can call him up whenever.
A few months back, I called him as I was preparing a talk I wasn't particularly into doing. I had originally committed to the talk to support a developer who was new to speaking. They backed out, and left me delivering the talk by myself. So I called my brother to think through what had changed in the last 10 years.
What he shared was foundational. He talked about how as a young programmer, he got to take a requirement and turn that into code. How most of his time went into writing code. How code he wrote was predominantly Java. And how now when someone joins in as a young programmer, they enter a whole different world.
Most of a new joining programmer's life is no longer writing code. It is writing code in multiple languages. It is configuring environments (as code). It is tweaking parameters, usually not well documented, to get the third party components to work your way in your environment. And it's not that writing code is enough. You need to write tests. Unit tests. Integration tests. System tests. And as you're writing the tests, you need to explore to figure out all the things you need to test.
Expectations for a young programmer has skyrocketed. We expect them to start more ready, and cover more ground.
As a tester, I'm often worried of my mindspace, ability to track different levels of abstraction and keeping quality of my work on a level I can be happy with. Not as perfectionist, but as someone who aspires to be better every day. My brother, as a developer, isn't that different. The world is changing around us for us all.
We're both asked more each day in our respective professions. The entry level requirements are going up. And with the next generations of future professionals growing through the elementary school now being taught programming from grade 1 onwards, it starts to make sense that programming is an entry level requirement for testers.
It's more about the foundation, than the active use of it. Seeing the possibilities. Knowing to ask help instead of fighting alone.
