Framing an experiment for recruiting

I was having a chat with my team folks, and we talked about how hard it is to feel connected with people you've never met. We had new colleagues in a remote location, and we were just about to head out to hang out and work together to make sure we feel connected. My colleagues jump into expressing the faceless nature of calls, triggering me to share a story on what I did this summer.

During my month of vacation, I talked to people over video, each call 15 minutes, about stuff they're into in testing. I learned about 130 topics, each call starting with the assumption that everyone is worthwhile yet we need some way of choosing which 12 end up on stage. Majority of them I talked face to face, and I know from past years that for me it feels as if we really met when we finally have a chance to physically be in the same space.

This is European Testing Conference Call for Collaboration process, and I cherish every single discussion the people have volunteered to have with me. These are people and everyone is valuable. I seek stories, good delivery and delivery I can help become good because the stories are worth it for the audience I design for.

This story lead to to say that I want to try doing our recruiting differently. I want to change from reading a CV and deciding if that person is worth talking to into deciding that if they found us worthwhile of their time, they deserve 15 minutes of my life.

I've automated the scheduling part, so my time investment with experience of 2 years and 300 calls is that I know how to do this without it eating away my time. All I need is that 15 minutes. I can also automate the rules of when I'm available for having a discussion and leave scheduling for the person I will talk to.

So with the 15 minutes face time, what will we do? With European Testing Conference we talk about talk ideas and contents of the talks. With recruitment process, we test for testers, and we code for programmers. And my teams seem to be up for the experiment!


My working theory is that we may be losing access to great testers by prematurely leaving them out. Simultaneously, we may be wasting a lot of effort in discussing if they should make it further in out processes. We can turn this around and see what happens.

Looks like there is a QE position I could start applying this next week! And a dev position we can apply it in about a month.

Meeting great people for 15 minutes is always worth the time. And we are all great - in our own different unique ways.

Flunking tester candidates in masses

Recently, I've been receiving messaging in LinkedIn. It starts with someone I don't know wanting to link with me. Since LinkedIn is my professional network, I check profile for complete fakeness and approve if it could be a person. The next step is getting a message, usually just a Hi. Nothing more. Since it is my professional network, my default response is "How may I help you?". The response to this is "I need to find a job".

These people often don't know why they are contacting *me*, beyond the fact that they just did and I responded to their greeting. When I ask more about what I could do specifically, the conversation ends with "I don't know".

If you don't know what you want, how do you know I would know what you need?

One of our teams is currently seeking a senior tester. It has not been easy. I have not really been a part of the process, except filling in during absence of other great testers. I see applications fly by due to notifications but I have not as much as read one for a while.

What still happens is that the other great testers share their wonders. They share the realization that the tester we are looking for is hard to find because it is a tester and a programmer (for test automation), great communicator and able to grasp complicated systems in a very practical manner. But they also share the realization that there is a surprising number of people who think the way to test is to write test cases. That exploratory testing means monkey testing and no serious tester would do that. That testing happens in the end after programming is done. None of these beliefs are true, and least of all in a company that emphasizes agile practices.

So if you're one of those people who feel like approaching me for a job help on LinkedIn, I just wanted to mention a few things you absolutely need to do. Go read stuff on Ministry of Testing. Look for things that introduce ideas of how test cases are not the thing that makes testing awesome. Learn to build the technical tools, and the most important tool: your brain. Join testers.io slack and look at what people talk about who identify as testers. Here's the key: it's not test cases.

I've been insisting that I don't see people like this in my bubble. I don't, because they are stopped at the gates. Learn more stuff that remains relevant. 

Interviews Are a Two-Way Street

We were recruiting, and had a team interview with a candidate. I was otherwise occupied, and felt unsure of hiring someone who I had no contact with, especially since the things I wanted to know of them were unanswered from my team. We look for people strong in C++, but also python and scripting, since a lot of a DevOps type of team's work ends up being not just pure homeground. So I called them, and spent my 10 minutes finding out what they want out of professional life, what makes them happy and making sure they were aware how delighted my often emotion-hiding team would be if they chose to hang out with us and do some great dev work. They signed. And I'm just as excited as everyone was after having had chance of meeting the candidate.

So often we enter an interview with the idea of seeing if the person is a fit for us. But as soon as we've established that, we should remember that most of the time, the candidates have options. Everyone wants to feel needed and welcome. Letting the feeling show isn't a bad thing.

There's a saying that individuals recruit people like them, and teams recruit people that fill the gaps - diverse candidates. For that to be true, you need to have first learned to appreciate work in team beyond your own immediate contribution.

All this recruiting stuff made me think back to one recruiting experience I had. I went through many rounds of checking. I had a manager's interview. Then a full day of psychological tests. Then a team interview. And finally, even the company CEO wanted to interview me. I required yet another step - I spent a day training testing for my potential future colleagues, in a mob. Every single step was about whether I was appropriate. If I would pass their criteria. They failed mine. They did not make me feel welcome. And the testing we did together showed how much use I would have been (nice bugs on their application, and lots of discipline in exploring) but also what my work would be: teaching and coaching, helping people catch up.

Your candidate chooses you just as much as you choose the candidate. Never forget.

Why positive discrimination is equality over time

I remember a spring day 20 years ago. I was a university student, who had just taken a course on public presenting with a teacher that turned out to be the most transformative in my life. What I remember is not that her forcing me to watch me speak on video made me realize my inner world was much more messy than my presentation. I remember her for one of my first discussions on feminism.

I was a hopelessly shy student who believed she possessed little opinions. And even if I did, I was very uncomfortable sharing them. While on that course, I read news every day to force myself to be even remotely able to have group discussions on day-to-day topics. That just wasn't me.

So when in the end of the course my teacher told me in private that she thought I was a feminist, I responded like so many women: I wasn't. I did not need to be. There was nothing wrong with equality. If anything, I was always just positively discriminated.

I did not think about that discussion for a very long time, but obviously years since have changed my perspective and raised my awareness on need of feminism. There's tons of wonderful writings on the problems and solutions, and my concern is still not that I get regularly mistreated, but that I've needed in many ways to be exceptional when normal should be enough.

A few days ago, I retweeted this:

Whenever I see 'women only apply for jobs when they meet 100% of the requirements, men when they meet 60%; just apply!', I read it as
"organisations systematically exclude women by including 'requirements' that aren't required, and here's how it falls on women to deal with it"

— Natasha Taylor (@Natashatashaetc) January 11, 2018

Let's look at what it claims:

• Women generally apply for jobs only when they meet all the requirements
• Some women apply without meeting all the requirements and that requires them extra effort because it is against what they'd naturally do.

Just sharing this tweet meant there was someone puzzled asking to be educated (extra work on women when all the resources are already available). To be honest, it did not sound as asking for education, much more on explaining to me why I shared a tweet that was just wrong using "one woman got selected with us even though she did not fill all the requirements" as evidence that this is not a general trend. Still, see point 2 above: she might have needed to exert extra effort to apply. Regardless, one data point isn't enough. 

In our discussion we got soon to a point I see commonly coming from women: There should not be positive discrimination - "I don't want to be selected for my gender". 

The thing is, acts of discrimination are a long-term phenomenon, and we need to look at it discrimination over long term, not as individual event happening at individual job interview.

• When I was 10, my family purchased our very first computer, and we had different ones ever since. They always were located in my (younger) brother's room and I asked for permission to use it as budget rules gave me space. His access was less limited. 
• He started working with programming seriously at age of 12 (I was 14). His friends were all into it. I coded games by typing them from magazines already at 12, but I never had a single friend who'd do that with me. 
• By time we both went to university to study computer science, he had 7 years of hobbyists programming because "computers were boys toys". I had a starting interest with time spent on BBSs and rudimentary programming I had done on "Teaching myself Turbo-Pascal" as schools gave you space to learn, they did not teach anything back then.  Most girls were not quite so advanced. 
• Most of my university students were with backgrounds akin to my brother. I was years behind. In addition, if I ever did group work, I got told I probably did not contribute anything. Both other students but also some teachers. I needed to continuously keep proof of my contributions, or work alone when others got to work in groups. 
• Any course with classroom exercises were my nightmare. There were 2% women and many teachers believed both genders needed to speak every time. I learned to skip classes to suffer less. Again, more work just to survive.
• If I was ready to get help, I had lots of the classmates helping me. Usually with the price of figuring out if I was single or not. 

Back then, this was how things were. I wasn't brave enough to call out any of this. I thought it was normal. That was the world I had always been in. I had no feminist friends to make me aware this was exceptional. I went through it all with plain stubbornness. 

I know I'm not alone with my experience.

So when then I get invited to a conference past the call for proposal process, I recognize that is positive discrimination. Similarly, if two candidates in job interview seem equal and the woman gets selected, that could also be positive discrimination. But we really don't hire just for skills of today, but potential of tomorrow. So it is less straightforward. 

With all the debt on the negative discrimination I've got to go through, I'm nowhere near equality yet. 

So I believe in equity. We need to help those who need more help more than those who started off in a more privileged position. Positive discrimination of equality over time - equity today. 

My story is one of a privileged white woman. The stuff other underprivileged groups go through means we need to compensate for them much longer. 

PS: I spent 30 minutes writing this post and I've had thousands of discussions like this in my lifetime since I realized I'm a feminist. Imagine what those not needing to have these discussions get accomplished with that time. 

My team is looking for a manager

I love my team, and I love my manager. My current manager however has come to the realization, that having 50 direct reports is too much, and while he always has time for me, there might be others that need different type of support from a manager and don't get the same access.

At first, he opened two manager positions internally. Both my manager and my team encouraged me to apply for the one for us, but I have other aspirations as I plan on being the best tester there is, and if I move, I will become a software architect. A trip (again) to management sounds like the wrong move for me. Everyone else had similar ideas internally, so we ended up where we are now: we are looking, externally for our team manager.

We're a really truly self-organized team (no product owner experiment ongoing, the team decides) and need a manager who understands what that means. And an ideal person for the role would be someone who is half tester (or dev) and half manager, and would like the idea of working as part of the team for some of their time.

As we were discussing this yesterday with the team, devs expressed that they'd love a tester. Well, they have good experiences of testers. And to clarify, they said it could be either someone with manual testing or test automation background.

So I call out to people I know: would working in Helsinki, in a half tester half manager role with awesome team becoming more awesome all the time be something you'd aspire for? If so, this is the position you should apply for.

Just a few words what usually happens: my manager screens candidates and discusses the manager part. He involves the team in another interview.

We're also looking someone with good understanding of full-stack development into another similar position for team that does Java/Javascript/AWS.  And if you're like the team members we have now, aspiring for learning more on how to build awesome products and you want to spend time with an automation emphasis, we're also looking to replace one of our full-time testers as they turn into a cyber security consultant.

All these 3 people end up in what I consider the product I work with, consisting of 7 teams. If you'd like to try out something further from me, my manager is also looking for a tester for cloud protection solutions.

Calling bs on the pipeline problem

Yesterday was a day of Women in Tech in Finland. After the appropriate celebrations and talks, today my feeds are filled with articles and comments around the pipeline problem. I feel exhausted.

The article I read around getting girls into the industry quotes 23% of women in the industry now. Yet, look at the numbers in relevant business and technical leadership positions. One woman among 5-6 people in the leadership groups isn't 23%. No women as head technical architects is even further from 23%. And don't start telling that there are no women of merit. Of course there are. You might just not pay attention.

In the last week, I've personally been challenged with two things that eat away my focus of being amazing and technical.

First of all, I was dodging a "promotion" into dead end middle management position. How would that ever make me a head technical architect I aspire to be? Yes, women with emotional intelligence make strong managers. But we also make excellent technical leaders.

Second, I was involved in a harrassment getting someone fired case in the community. It has been extremely energy draining even if I was just in a support role.

Maybe having to deal with so much of the extra emotional labor is what makes some people think again less of my merits. And I'm getting tired of it.

We talk of the pipeline problem, on how little girls don't take interest in computers and programming. If they look forward into their role models, they see women fighting for their advancement and mere existence. The pipeline leaks, and almost everyone who is in it is regularly considering exit just to get rid of the attitudes the ones with more privilege don't have to deal with.

How about improving things for the future generations on focusing on the current one so that we can honestly tell our little girls that this is the industry worth going for? It is the industry of the future, and we're not going to leave it, but a little bit of support for the underdogs would be nice.

When I do keynotes in conferences, I get the questions of  "are you here to watch your kids while your husband speaks" from the other female keynoter's husband. I get the questions of  "you're one of the organizers" when most of the organizers are women. And yet in the same places I get men telling that there is no difference in how we are treated.

Just pick 50% of women of potential into the relevant groups we all want to reach. Those 50% of women are not going to be worse than the men you're selecting now. Those positions help them realize their full potential. And showing this industry is more equal might just help with the beginning of the pipeline too. Because the little girls don't only have a dad who makes sure they get interested in math and STEM, they have a mom who could be more too.

How I was interviewed as a tester

I've been a tester, test manager and again tester for a while. I think I know what I'm doing and I know I have a lot more to learn. I've been a restless soul telling all my employees so far that I will move after two years. Granlund expected me to last a year when I said two. And I stayed four and absolutely loved it.

As four years passed, I started thinking if I however should move. I've looked into two jobs, been offered the two jobs and ended up accepting one of them. The first I passed with a mantra "Quality of Life" - I had a lot of that with Granlund. No stress daily releases, great team and a supporting manager. 5 minute route to work. I concluded I would be a fool to give all of that up. And yet, I did.

For the job I passed, I was very close on accepting it. I went through the whole process of recruiting: meeting the recruiting manager, full day of evaluations with a psychologist, and even spend a full day training the extended team to figure out if I would like to work with them. The last thing was my suggestion, and we had a very nice and wonderful day of testing the company product in a mob format, finding bugs they were previously unaware of.

The reason I did not accept the job in the end was that I felt like the whole process was about finding reasons why I wouldn't be the right person or good enough. The recruiting manager knew of me from a shared past, and the questions I remember him asking were about my bad (past) habits of impatience. The psychologist was assessing how I would complement the team, but also pointed out that my "clock cycle" is fast and people may have hard time staying in my pace. The team training was about me seeing the team and the product, but when it came to the company framing the day, it was about "work sample from me". As if they were the only one making a decision when recruiting!

With the job I passed, I spent a lot of time thinking about what they could have done better. They could have compensated me for the time they pushed me around in recruiting process. Or they could have at least acknowledged that more (unpaid) phases to recruiting might protect them from bad hires, but also from really good ones. They could have made me feel they want me, not only that they could use me if I convince them on their points. They were not the only one needing convincing. And with senior software people, the employers might need to consider their approaches.

The job I accepted was opposite. They invited me for an interview very much the same way as the other, though networks. The first interview focused on figuring out how they can  build a job I would accept. They built the job for me, with a description that did not exist at that point.

I interviewed with the manager for the newly opened position, but our focus was on discussing ideas of what to do in the job. It felt more like an idea sharing session, and my focus was on assessing if I could learn to love this manager as much as I did my current one.

The HR interview seemed like an introduction to how awesome place the company is and how nice benefits they have. Sure, there were some questions on how I approach things and how I manage with the English language.

Then I interviewed with the team. It was a chat about stuff, with focus on "we just wanted to know you test and don't only manage". But I got to see that I would get along with them, just as much as the other way around before I needed to make my decision.

So I took the job. I started this Monday. I feel like I've come home again. I have amazing team, and interesting technical (and people) problems. I know I'm a piece to the puzzle that helps. On day 1, I got introduced to what we're doing. On day 2, I got the test environments up and running. And on day 3, I tested and found bugs; I shared ideas of how I'd want to test things we've created and got acceptance on testability changes; I got careful positive marks that we'd mob on different types of automation soon to bring together unit tests, system tests and exploratory testing because they just won't say no to things that make sense.

I'm feeling extremely grateful that there are companies who approach recruiting like they want to hire, instead of trying to figure out reasons why they wouldn't. The latter sounds a bit like testing: Look for opposing evidence. When there's none, we guess it's time to release.

I need to feel I'm wanted and needed. So for now, I'm just going to savor this. The energy of being wanted and welcome takes me a long way in doing the things I can help with. 

How I interviewed testers

My regular job responsibility is not to do recruitment. Recently, I've had two experiences of recruiting from completely different perspectives. First was one where two companies were considering to recruit me (or I was considering to be employed with them) and of the companies succeeded. The other was an experience to provide professional services to support recruiting. And that is what I wanted to write about.

The case was with a company that had interviewed several people and shortlisted two people that could be appropriate. The two people had gone through the regular interviews with non-testers. I offered to spend 30 minutes with each candidate they thought they would be interested in to pair test and give an assessment of how they approach testing.

My assessment report for the company included an hour of video of screen & us testing together, and a summary of their strong and weak spots as I saw them. We tested the company's application for a pre-selected feature, in a test environment.

I opened the session telling we'd work as a pair with the rule of "I have an idea, you take the keyboard". I had the idea first to introduce them into the application and most of the session I would be the hands, as their ideas mattered.

In 30 minutes, I got to see the testers flow on how they get started with something new. I got to see

• if they would take notes / model things while testing.
• if they see bugs. 
• how they model technologies and focus of testing. 
• if they were dependent on external answers or could provide theories of their own.
• if they at the end of the session has ideas for making the testing deeper or if they were ready to move on to other features. 

The interviewing non-testers had little ability to assess this without the guidance. Personally I think having the non-tester interviews first (which were longer than these sessions) was probably the wrong way to do the narrowing down the candidates.

The "cultural fit" people assess in interviews means we often look for people who look like us, talk like us and appear to fit in. But it leads us to choose people who might not fill in the gaps we have. 

And what if the best of testers in the lot never got to the finish line because they were dropped out by people who don't have the necessary knowledge of what testing by someone who knows how to test looks like? 

If I ever again move, I will suggest testing together in my next interview. With or without bugs, you see the way the person models the application and the system, and if nothing else, the recruiting managers would need to get better at recognizing skilled testers. 

Work for free when you could get paid

As I've decided to leave the current employer that I work with to become a consultant again, there's been some talk around the office on how to find someone to replace me.

It's great to hear that the work I've done has been appreciated and that the vast numbers of fixed issues over the 2,5 years as well as the changes in how our teams work are appreciated. I've enjoyed my time here with all the puzzles and challenges, some of which I've blogged about. When I joined, I could build practices as I saw fit, and I saw things from agile development, exploratory testing and automated checking perspective. There was also the experience that all things "testing" are not the same in value: getting a developer to test (calling him tester) resulted as no improvement on product quality and throw-away test automation.

When I was recruited, I found this job by a lucky accident. My employer did not know of the right places to look for good candidates. We still haven't posted an ad for the position, but as I would like to help out, I've mentioned the job in passing at Finnish Association for Software Testing LinkedIn group and had three candidate contacts. We're requiring fluent Finnish, which already rules out two out of three.

As it seems my supervisor has not made much progress on posting the adds, I started looking into other routes to find him candidates. As the job isn't really something you need to be the best in testing in Finland for (modesty in my skills is not one of my traits...), it could also be a great opportunity for someone new with the right attitude for testing.  So I suggested to consider a recruiting program TestPro.

The idea with TestPro is that there's a 7 month period of training and practice with the recruiting companies, after which the companies decide on recruiting the candidate. There's 22 days of classroom training and full days of working at the recruiting company, and during which the candidate is unemployed and gets some social benefits, but isn't officially working as in getting paid for the work. This program is targeted for the unemployed or people under the threat of becoming unemployed, as in case you really are out of options it's a great opportunity to get into testing.

Some hours after suggesting this route to my supervisor, it hit me: I just made an awful mistake. I have two reasons to think I made a mistake:

1. There's a PAID job open right now, and I just postponed that for whoever would get recruited by seven months of slave labor. I should know how to do better.
2. The training the candidate receives is near to worthless from our perspective. It shows aptitude, interest and commitment (7 months of free work...) that you go into it, but the contents you will receive are not ones I would find valuable for the person to recruit. Unless the person is just right, the likelihood of ISTQB Foundation and ISTQB Agile Certificate courses to make them worse is high and they'd be better off in this job without them. The added focus on test automation attracts developers with no clue on how to perform testing with valuable results. 

There's still time to fix the mistake I'm making, I hope. Unless the temptation of "free labor" already turned some managers to the dark side. But I need to find the candidates that want to learn  by doing, take BBST and RST classes during the work hours and become a great tester within the context-driven ideas. I have little time to go look for candidates, but perhaps this blog post encourages the right one to get in touch. Even with the Finnish language skill required.

TestPro (http://www.testpro.fi) might be great, if you look for testers with the stuff they are training. I'm just not convinced they teach very much of the relevant stuff. Not only because I created the first TestPro contents years ago, but also because just few years back I was not welcomed when critiquing TestPro contents on agile testing that had very little resemblance to stuff that agile testing is in my experience. As I was told, I should not have had access to the course material that was shown to me because there was an NDA on not giving the material to non-participants.