Geekology Blog

Understanding Test Automation Engineers and Their Job

Software testing is an essential area of work in software development that is both wide and deep. It includes “any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results.” Anyone that has come to even a basic level of exposure to software testing has seen the abundant and, oftentimes, cryptic terms in this area, such as smoke testing, white-box testing, dynamic testing, regression testing, and stress testing, just to name a few. Read more…

Making Sense of “Number of Years of Experience” in Technical Recruitment

“3+ years experience with Ruby on Rails or similar web frameworks (i.e. Django)”

“5-10 years of experience in software development, framework architecture and design”

“7 years of experience in a full stack environment, building large scale consumer web applications”

There are endless examples of these requirements listed on typical job descriptions.  Many people, including job seekers, hiring manager and recruiters, recognize that “X years of experience” is a highly unreliable proxy to gauge someone’s capabilities.  Then, why do we keep using “number of years of experience” to describe what we are looking for?  Isn’t there anything else better? Read more…