I suspect you have some small scraps of time during your workday in order to try to learn a subject that seems insurmountably large. The first suggestion I would make is to adopt a time management process, particularly the Pomodoro Technique, which allows you to break up large tasks into small ones and make the most of small, discrete chunks of time.

Second, you need to know what you will tackle in those small chunks of time. I’m sure there are other ways of breaking it up, but I might break learning test automation into these broad parts...

When looking for and evaluating candidates, I do not really care much about specific frameworks or technologies. These come and go, and their relative worth is generally due to either current fashion or their prevalence at whatever company happens to be offering the job. What I much prefer to see are skills and knowledge that are independent of the tools used.

As these roles and the expectations that surround them mature, it will become easier for companies to know what they are looking for, and easier to describe that in a job posting. With more examples to follow, candidates will have a clearer path to prepare for these jobs. Salaries will improve as the value of this work is made apparent, attracting more candidates, and we will see a healthier balance of supply and demand...

Automated testing is undergoing a huge transformation at WK ELM Solutions, and we need more creative and inspired people to make it happen! If you or anyone you know wants to be part of our revolution, check out this job posting for a Software Developer in Test.

Your brain and body have positioned your audience as potential threats and have prepared you to either fight them or run in panic from the room. Since you shouldn't do either of these things, some adjustments are in order.

So why does it matter? Because by expecting a computer science education to make you a good programmer, you are both asking too much and too little of the experience. It is too much to expect that you could learn all these skills in a classroom, and too little to expect that software development would be the sole aim of computer science.

The bad news is that you haven't actually measured the person's practical technical ability, especially in the context of team development, and have learned little if anything about how the candidate works under real-world circumstances. Because offering criticism without suggestion is basically just complaining, here are some things that might help get those last bits of information.

One thing you will learn in the MBA program early and have reinforced over and over again is that people in business positions solve nearly every problem using Excel. If you can resist the temptation to do the same, you will find that the MBA program offers a low-pressure opportunity to create lots and lots of software.

Just as in high school and your undergraduate studies, you will feel like you are doing everything. This time, however, it’s really part of your training to learn how to deal with that and get everyone working. You will learn how to use collaboration tools to work better and gain a new respect for the people you work with. You will try, and fail, to just assign sections of work to people and try to glue it together before the deadline, and learn from this failure.

You will be faced with difficult choices about your priorities and will need to make them correctly, whatever that means for you. Being a graduate student means daily delivery on a commitment that you made when you were better rested and when you idealized the process and experience. Chugging along despite the realities of grad school demonstrates your ability to honor your commitments and work toward a distant goal.

We are at the mercy of people who are trying to pre-translate their problems and requirements into a language they think we understand, which dumbs it down just enough that friction is introduced in the form of ambiguity. It’s like lossy compression, in a way, with those compression artifacts showing up in the form of arguments over acceptance criteria.

I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, and I think I have some reasons why getting an MBA as a software engineer makes sense, even if you have no immediate plans to be a manager.