My achievement

In recent days, I was thinking about a question : other than technique skills, what are the skills a person have which can he/she get a job during interview. In my experience of job interview, many time, people asked about algorithm and code questions, and some asked about general behavior questions , such as how to handle conflicts, schedule. However, other than these skills, do you think other skills can make you a good hire, and if so, how you present them during interview. 

 

First, I don't have the answer for this question. But I like to write down something about myself which I think making me a good hire. I have many strong areas other than coding which makes me can contribute more to the team, but I found I often failed to sell me during interview. So I decide that how about I write down them first, and then think about how should I present them during interview.

 

What I have achieved?

Let me first talk about what I have been achieved during my eight years in SQL Server team. I was involved four major releases, including SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012 and later monthly release of SQL Azure database (BTW, what I found that if you mention you are doing SQL Azure, you will get more attention from Recruiter than just mention SQL Server). I help to delivered six major features for SQL Server, and a couple of mission critical features for SQL Azure. You can look at my cool blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/b/qingsongyao/archive/2012/10/25/my-past-testing-experience.aspx to see our testing strategies.

 

I like to help others

  I enjoy working with my teammates and try best to help them. I received more than 10 Kudos from others (Kudo is a service which allow people to recognition helpful peers cross Microsoft. Here are two examples of Kodus I received:

 

"Thank you so much Qingsong for continue improving SSM test code structure while SSM team no longer exist. "

 

"Great ideas and effort in moving forward scenario testing through SimpleScaleClient as well as delivering improvement Test Refactoring."

 

   I like to mention that the first Kudo. We had a re-org in last year, and thousands test projects we used to own will be spitted to four new teams. At the same time, there is an ongoing effort to refactor them into another new totally new platform. When I was involved the test ownership transition, I volunteer to refactor the code to the new platform with a couple of colleagues instead of relying on new team to do the refactoring. As a result, we are not only clean up the code, also save others lot of time. Here is a couple of thanks letter from leaders:

 

"From the nature of this project, it is a Garage kind of project, self-initiated, no-official-funding, loosely-managed. People often use this approach to deliver something cool and shining. But I never hear people would use this way to improve their legacy test code. Especially when they stop owing these code. Only one reason can explain the motivation behind of it: they care. "

 

"As a new owner of areas of SSMS, I have to give my “THANK YOU”. This will make it much easier for our teams to take on our portion of these tests!"

 

"I echo the appreciation of the value of this work, this type of work is a tough undertaking when so many efforts are focused toward new features. 

Thank you very much for all of your efforts and the great results achieved; this will indeed help us accomplish a much cleaner transition with a much healthier suite of tests to steward.

 

 

I am a thinker

    I spend lot of times to read blogs, articles and books. I also write 186 Internal Blogs, and more than 50 public blogs about Testing, SQL Server and Cloud Computing. I actively involve many communities inside and outside Microsoft and contribute to them by providing suggestions and comments and offering talks. For example, I discussed a set of commonly used engineering principle and practices, namely, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and various Testing Strategies to Seattle Area Software Quality Assurance Group. I wrote Tester's Career Series articles which help our testers to grow their career. Personally, I think it is one of my biggest strength. I can always have cool ideas which have big impact on the team. When it comes into testing, I learned lot of testing techniques, such as testing in production, exploratory testing, crowdsourcing testing, acceptance test driven development.

 

I am not only a taker, and also a does

   I always use the ideas I learned in my work. For example, when I learned ATDD by spending $99, I applied ATDD in my daily work, and being the person who introduced the technique to our company. Many of my ideas were adopted and resulted in good return of investment. My Garage projects (the projects I built using my spare time) won three Science Awards during annual science fairs and One President Award for SQL Server Annual Festival. 

 

I am passion on engineering excellent

   As an engineer, I am super passion on engineering excellent. I tried my best to improve our process to reduce waste and improve efficiency. For example, I approached our leadership team to show how much efficiency we can achieve if we use ReSharper tool, and this resulted in the whole SQL team can use this team now. Here are the kudo I received:

"Thanks for help with contacts, how-to, and pushing our management to get our first batch of SQL-wide Reshaper licenses. "

"Thanks for being proactive and getting Resharper license to SQL team! "

 

  I realized that our engineers are hard to find the information he/she wanted, so I create a new web server to assist them. Here are the kudos I received:

"https://qsql/ is super helpful!"

"Thanks for developing https://qsql"

 

I am always customer focus and passion on quality

   Throughout of my whole career as tester, I always think more about our customer. I think about what they want, why we build the feature, and how to make them happy. Recently, I am passion about usability since I want people to enjoy using the product I help to build. Most of my testing strategies are focus on testing what customer want .

 

This is all about me. I like to get some feedback from Recruiters and Interviewees.