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Basingstoke
Feb. 14th, 2011 12:39 amNot Bradley Stoke as my brain keeps wanting me to call it.
Yeah so looks like my next project is going to be Basingstoke, initially for three months, but liable to be extended. The customer is not a particularly large company (I think making use of new investment money to grow the business before a customer with a better product moves into the UK market) so they don't want to have to keep paying us for too long. They want us to come in improve their systems, move them to an agile development process (which be interesting considering their mass of legacy code and their lack of code coverage currently) and help train up new staff as they hire them. They want me as an automated tester helping build up an NUnit based framework to improve their Selenium scripts. The code itself is largely ASP.NET with some C++ stuff to handle VoIP. I've used Selenium last year and have a pretty good feel for it's limitations in regression suites (slow and too tightly coupled to the interface design, but otherwise pretty good); I've done a .NET training course (read a book) and it's not massively different from Java, and I've used JUnit before so NUnit won't be a massive stretch.
So the simple summary is a project using technologies I either have some, a little or no experience with in Basingstoke. Looks like it could be a good learning experience, though potentially very stressful in Basingstoke. There a new customer so we have to impress meaning it might also involve long unpaid overtime hours in Basingstoke. Or to use my employers term 'Working a professional day' i.e. staying to get the job done. Of course that's fine because and I approximately quote 'When you're living away in a hotel you'll want to stay at the office longer because you'll have nothing to do in the evenings'... in Basingstoke.
The reasons I like working at my job: it's Bath based (except when it isn't), overtime is paid for and only requested when a project demands it (except apparently it seems when the customer is important enough) and it's generally a good company to work for (unlike some of the customers - who you end up working directly for).
I'm going to spend the first couple of working weeks living in a hotel in Basingstoke, and then probably aim to do a mix of living and commuting via a pool car there on a 2:3 ratio. Can't say I'm looking forward to it. I think I'd have been OK with the professional day or the living/commuting distance just not really both at the same time. Still the rest of my time my job is better than most, does leave me wondering if there's one that's better on average overall though, even if not as good at times.
On the plus side all being well I'll get to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
almosthonest, seeing as the customer is based in the building opposite the one in which he works. The work should be good for my CV. I also did really well on the interview. Considering the only advice the salesman who witnessed the interview could give me on my interview technique was 'Be less animated with your hands when you talk' and 'Get those bands to stop you're sleeves sliding forward when you're being animated' I did pretty damn well. Told them everything they wanted to hear, answered questions giving examples that were very relevant to what they asked, or demonstrated suitable similar skills when they didn't quite fit and generally impressed them.
Considering I've not had an interview in about 6 years (when I got the job at IPL during my third year) and that I've been worried that my lack of deep knowledge in any particular technology was going to hinder me, I'm really pleased with that. Apparently being regularly chucked onto projects and having to pick up a whole range of new systems, technologies and responsibilities quickly is a good thing. Still it's doing really well to get a job I don't want.
The other thing is I still don't know my start date. Contractual wrangling continues. I know they wanted me from tomorrow, but I don't know when I'm going to hear anything, and how much time they'll be from when I'm told I'm starting and when I start. Still I'll guess we'll see and I'll try to stop worrying about it.
Final question: Colleagues now working at Company A had to pass through a series of very difficult phone interviews going in depth about specific technologies, and being one of the few who passed, now find themselves running seminars and lectures to teach these same people the very basics of programming (they literally new how to talk the talk without being able to crawl the crawl). Where as Company B came to us upfront that most of their staff are average, their codes a bit of a mess and they only manage to run about 30% of their test suite. Should I be extra worried that they'll be worse than they think, or glad they actually know they're not doing very well?
Yeah so looks like my next project is going to be Basingstoke, initially for three months, but liable to be extended. The customer is not a particularly large company (I think making use of new investment money to grow the business before a customer with a better product moves into the UK market) so they don't want to have to keep paying us for too long. They want us to come in improve their systems, move them to an agile development process (which be interesting considering their mass of legacy code and their lack of code coverage currently) and help train up new staff as they hire them. They want me as an automated tester helping build up an NUnit based framework to improve their Selenium scripts. The code itself is largely ASP.NET with some C++ stuff to handle VoIP. I've used Selenium last year and have a pretty good feel for it's limitations in regression suites (slow and too tightly coupled to the interface design, but otherwise pretty good); I've done a .NET training course (read a book) and it's not massively different from Java, and I've used JUnit before so NUnit won't be a massive stretch.
So the simple summary is a project using technologies I either have some, a little or no experience with in Basingstoke. Looks like it could be a good learning experience, though potentially very stressful in Basingstoke. There a new customer so we have to impress meaning it might also involve long unpaid overtime hours in Basingstoke. Or to use my employers term 'Working a professional day' i.e. staying to get the job done. Of course that's fine because and I approximately quote 'When you're living away in a hotel you'll want to stay at the office longer because you'll have nothing to do in the evenings'... in Basingstoke.
The reasons I like working at my job: it's Bath based (except when it isn't), overtime is paid for and only requested when a project demands it (except apparently it seems when the customer is important enough) and it's generally a good company to work for (unlike some of the customers - who you end up working directly for).
I'm going to spend the first couple of working weeks living in a hotel in Basingstoke, and then probably aim to do a mix of living and commuting via a pool car there on a 2:3 ratio. Can't say I'm looking forward to it. I think I'd have been OK with the professional day or the living/commuting distance just not really both at the same time. Still the rest of my time my job is better than most, does leave me wondering if there's one that's better on average overall though, even if not as good at times.
On the plus side all being well I'll get to see
almosthonest, seeing as the customer is based in the building opposite the one in which he works. The work should be good for my CV. I also did really well on the interview. Considering the only advice the salesman who witnessed the interview could give me on my interview technique was 'Be less animated with your hands when you talk' and 'Get those bands to stop you're sleeves sliding forward when you're being animated' I did pretty damn well. Told them everything they wanted to hear, answered questions giving examples that were very relevant to what they asked, or demonstrated suitable similar skills when they didn't quite fit and generally impressed them.Considering I've not had an interview in about 6 years (when I got the job at IPL during my third year) and that I've been worried that my lack of deep knowledge in any particular technology was going to hinder me, I'm really pleased with that. Apparently being regularly chucked onto projects and having to pick up a whole range of new systems, technologies and responsibilities quickly is a good thing. Still it's doing really well to get a job I don't want.
The other thing is I still don't know my start date. Contractual wrangling continues. I know they wanted me from tomorrow, but I don't know when I'm going to hear anything, and how much time they'll be from when I'm told I'm starting and when I start. Still I'll guess we'll see and I'll try to stop worrying about it.
Final question: Colleagues now working at Company A had to pass through a series of very difficult phone interviews going in depth about specific technologies, and being one of the few who passed, now find themselves running seminars and lectures to teach these same people the very basics of programming (they literally new how to talk the talk without being able to crawl the crawl). Where as Company B came to us upfront that most of their staff are average, their codes a bit of a mess and they only manage to run about 30% of their test suite. Should I be extra worried that they'll be worse than they think, or glad they actually know they're not doing very well?
