Trenches comic: February 14, 2012 - Embarkation

Bogey

Mentor under this Senior QA Engineer

02/14/2012 - Anonymous

I would guess that 90% of the time in when you first start off in QA, they pair you up with a senior level person to help show you the ropes. These are all the senior level outcomes I have seen or heard about:

1) Dumbstruck - (what happened to me) You sit with them and they tell you absolutely nothing of what they are doing or why. Worse they use many arcane and specialized commands and scripts that only they know and they don’t tell you about them or give you access to them.

2) Social Butterfly - They talk and talk but never about work, at least not really. You want to know what happened last weekend, but if you ask about the last item under test, you get a glib answer.

3) Smart Alec - This person wants to be a developer rather than a QA person. You just start out and they don’t explain any of the terms to you, even the in house terminology. Want to know what AST or TPKR or JBMD means, look it up on the internal wiki site. Even though you are taking notes and don’t have time to look away at the 100s of things he is doing, how the hell are you supposed to relate those acronyms while learning the system?

4) Beauty and the Geek - This hasn’t happened to me (sadly) and I have only heard of one story of something like this actually happening in over 17 years in SQA so take it with a bit of salt. The trainee sits down with an engineer who is drop dead gorgeous. The story I heard is that he requested a change of engineers since the low cut blouse was making him uncomfortable. He lied and said it was her perfume was giving him a headache.

Neuroskeptic

Story is quite good. The comic is exactly the same as the last one, though (when management throws us a bone, top dog takes it.)

DiannaoChong

I had this happen to me this year. "hey diannao, you are the head admin for this new system, learn it inside and out, you will be forced to be a low ranking individual, but will get accredited in this software in this small corner of your world over here for the company" "oh by the way know how we joked about sending you to that developer conference for this in las vegas? we went ahead and sent the director of IS who has no idea what this system is without telling anyone. Thats why hes out today,a hangover from when Metallica showed up."

At least my boss was as dismayed by this as I was. Misery loves company I guess?

Gaslight

Glad to see the return of LBB, but yeah, comic is pretty much the same as the last one, minus the character backstory revelations.

Lindsay Lohan

I actually really liked this one. It is essentially the same joke but without the added anger at how stupid/entitled the main character acted. This one actually feels more true to a workplace.

Aurich

One more and it'll be a trend. Maybe.. there's a bonus or something... and Cora somehow takes it... I dunno.

And when I saw "The Beauty and the Geek" I thought for sure it was going to be a situation where one of the two is unexpectedly female (not necessarily stunning), and the entire time is spent trying to impress them feats of strength and wit and whatnot.

ArcSyn

Aurich wrote:

One more and it'll be a trend. Maybe.. there's a bonus or something... and Cora somehow takes it... I dunno.

And when I saw "The Beauty and the Geek" I thought for sure it was going to be a situation where one of the two is unexpectedly female (not necessarily stunning), and the entire time is spent trying to impress them feats of strength and wit and whatnot.

Yeah, I thought the roles would be reversed (girl was just hired) and the guy would have trouble actually teaching her how the system works.

Viktor Walters

Anyone notice that both authority figures are now gone for whatever happens next?

Bursar

Whoever has the conch takes control, I suppose.