Not a professional response
Try having a fucking user who has a lightweight laptop but wants to use their freaking Ipad to do everything and has had to get a special printer so he can bloody print off the thing…
Apple should be banned in the workforce
Test
Except for iphones. It’s gas the way the people who insist they “need to get a mac” are generally the most clueless about computers.
Iphone are ok but the amount of people with iphones who dont know how to update their network passwords that they change every 90 days is madness
Sitting in my bookcase at present…
What’s software testing like?
Is it boring? Is it challenging?
Boring as shit I’d say. I think CLD is heavily involved in that area
If you are only starting off it is a good area to get into as you will learn how things work but other than it is boring repetitive and you wont be allowed get involved in the problem solving.
The amount of times I have deployed stuff and then had to roll it back because there was a massive error in the code is unreal and then you ask was it tested and of course the answer always comes back Yes, it worked fine in testing. :strokechin: My answer is usually me hole it did.
It depends what area of testing you are in…
I am involved in performance testing an application thats used by financial analysts dotted around the globe. These guys are constantly looking for improvements in the speed that data arrives on their screens.
Spend most of the day with a few Oracle gurus who are constantly fine tuning their queries and retesting an analysts the improvements.
Functional testing can be boring as fcuk alright. I’ve automated 90% of the functionality testing and only need to manually test new functionality.
The lads have covered most of it. I’m involved in Localisation testing. Which sometimes is interesting. e.g. learning about different alphabets [Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew etc…] and how computers treat them. How certain languages land on different code pages and break programs because of that. Finding bugs is easy enough when you know how and why they will occur. But a lot of the time you are testing the same thing in 50+ languages which is soul crushing.
If you can automate things and you are working with a bunch of borderline technophobes you can really set yourself apart and it allows you to be more productive doing other things that make you look good while the computer does the donkey work for you. Because, it’s very important to remember, being good at your job and making yourself look good at your job are not the same thing.
I’m more interested in the configuration and infrastructural side of things. I’d ideally like to move out of testing into a Service Engineering role which is more about managing datacentres. The configuration side of things comes more naturally to me.
Testing is a bizarre profession in some ways. If you find a really good bug just before you ship a product, instead of being hailed as a hero/saviour like a footballer scoring a last minute goal, you get the inevitable string of wise after the event questions from leads, managers and PMs on:
Why this wasn’t caught before now?
Are there more bugs like this that were missed?
etc…
Whereas a lot of the time a late code change caused the bug.
Localisation testing is especially tedious in that a big deal is made about making sure the quality of every language is the same, but the reality is nobody really gives a shit if OK is not translated in Dari.
Only a handful of people will use it anyway.
I had a very satisying moment earlier where a rather irate person contacted me to say that she never received an email last night and she was “extremely concerned” that she may be missing lots of email because she only found out about this email because she got a reply from someone else cc’d on the mail. I checked the logs, was sure she had got the mail, called up to her desk, where she again started going on “what if i’m not receiving other email” etc etc, I clicked open her deleted items and there was the email she “never got”.
A small but satisfying victory.
How did she react to this Runt? Did she shower you with praise? 
No, she sheepishly grumbled something about not knowing how it got in there. Usual story.
Regularly happens with software upgrades, people claiming they used to be able to do things which they couldn’t:
PA: I used to be able to do this in the old version of word
Me: I have the old version on laptop here, I’ll bring it up and you can show me how you used to do it
/* Bring up the laptop, they can’t do whatever it was */
PA: It doesn’t matter, I’ll figure it out myself
[quote=“The Runt, post: 692573”]
No, she sheepishly grumbled something about not knowing how it got in there. Usual story.
Regularly happens with software upgrades, people claiming they used to be able to do things which they couldn’t:
PA: I used to be able to do this in the old version of word
Me: I have the old version on laptop here, I’ll bring it up and you can show me how you used to do it
/* Bring up the laptop, they can’t do whatever it was */
PA: It doesn’t matter, I’ll figure it out myself[/quote]
Hardly surprising to hear how you like to make people feel small.
Wrong thread
The key to a boring unchallenging job like Software testing is to make it sound challenging to your fellow agile team members.
That gives you an extra 3 hours a day to do other stuff on the side. TFK, odd jobs, run a small business, study etc…
Datacentre up in smoke. On call looks as though it will be a night sitting on the couch raking up the overtime 
What happened? Did someone try to upgrade your system from Windows NT to XP?