Erik Mathy

Reading the replies and I agree with the direction of the idea. The reality is that beyond the scope of tech writing, it becomes a content issue. So it's less that we need a CDO, but more of a focus on the information experience across the company/brand. How are customers interacting with the content across your internal orgs/silos? It's difficult to do this at a grass roots level without buy-in from the ELT. And there has to be a quantifiable business reason for doing so. Each leader - manager - team has their own business goals that they are measured against. If the content/info experience isn't part of that business mandate it's challenging to fight upstream. Once you get past to Senior Mgr or Director level, the job focuses a lot more on the business results (do more with less, stay in your budget, etc) than the actual work (documentation, # of tickets closed, and so on) Not to say we shouldn't keep trying to drive that cross-org collaboration and consideration of the content experience. But it's complicated. At a certain point budget comes into play: either time to do the extra work, funding for headcount, or new tools. And you can't ask for any of that until you prove that you can demonstrate 5x, 10x ROI.

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If you're the kind of person who's excited about all the recent S3 feature announcements (bucket policy unlocks via temporary root sessions, up to millions of buckets per account, pagination and region filtering for ListBuckets, conditional writes, ListCallerAccessGrants API) and you're attending re:Invent, then you should come to our storage track session, STG306 Advanced security patterns on Amazon S3. Learn how to use all the exciting new stuff securely in the most interactive format available at re:Invent!

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I'm going to post a few challenges I have had as a software QA. I should be relaxing today but those that know me, know my brain is always in thirty places at once. To developers: Trust your QA. Y'all don't know how many times I've heard, "Well, it works on my local". I don't care. In the test environment, it breaks. I do my due diligence to investigate why, present evidence in logs and from the database, present recordings, and meticulously document steps of reproduction and results. And even after, I still get, "It works on my local". Get off the dang local. NO ONE knows this software, app, platform, etc. better than the QA because we live it more than anyone else does. To business analysts: I know you all are overwhelmed. But please stop copying and pasting Acceptance Criteria for similar features. It makes a mess for developers and QA because the AC doesn't match or conflicts with not only the developed feature but integration as well. Which brings me to my next point... What QA is: Everyone thinks of us as just testers. I am sick of that. I spend half my time working with the product owner, BAs, and Devs, just making sure the AC reflects the solution needing to be resolved. I can't tell you how many times I have had to address with the BAs conflicts in a story over AC, nonsensical AC, WTF verbiage, etc. So then the developers get confused and we are in long meetings addressing what is messed up. We are here to help you ask the questions you didn't think to ask. We don't just test..... we look at future issues too. We like process improvements. Automation: Stop asking me to automate a one-off feature test that hasn't even gone through UAT yet. It's time wasted. Too many companies do this. Might as well give me the day off for the time it takes to do that because the automation is useless after UAT. Learn the purpose of automation. Product Owner: When I tell you before a demo not to demo certain things because there are still issues, don't shred me after the demo because you decided to demo them anyway and they break. I TOLD YOU not to do that, and why. Data: QA worst nightmare. My last position I would get two test records to test against 20 AC when I first started. I said "Helz no". I built up a catalog of test records I could use, positive and negative, as I progressed because I want multiple records against every AC. Which I often shared with the developers for their unit tests who loved it. QA needs data, all. You give me two records, don't yell at me that coverage isn't thorough. Probably sounded more a rant. But I'm opinionated. Where many QA are not. And these are common issues. Want to improve QA, improve the above.

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The Ghosting Epidemic: Why Companies Aren't Getting Back to Me 📵 A few months ago, I received an email from Anabel. She was desperate. After months of job searching, she hadn't even made it past the initial screening for a Software QA Engineering role. Anabel had the experience, the skills, and the determination—but her resume wasn't getting noticed. I knew the problem: her resume wasn’t optimized for the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that most companies use to filter candidates. Anabel’s resume was a jumbled list of accomplishments without a clear focus, and crucial keywords were missing. I explained to her how ATS works, how it scans resumes for specific terms, and how the layout and wording of her resume could make the difference between getting an interview or being overlooked. Anabel was intrigued. She had never realized how critical a well-structured resume was, not just for getting noticed, but for showcasing her true potential. I offered to help her redesign her resume using a simple, ATS-friendly template. Together, we highlighted her key skills—functional testing, regression testing, defect tracking—using the exact language that employers were searching for. We also structured her experience to focus on quantifiable achievements, like reducing bug turnaround time by 20% and leading cross-platform testing efforts. Within two weeks of sending out her revamped resume, Anabel started receiving interview invitations. By the end of the month, she had landed her dream job as a Software QA Engineer. Are you ready to land your dream job? Let’s make sure your resume is working for you, not against you. I specialize in crafting ATS-friendly resumes that highlight your strengths and get you noticed. Contact me today, and let’s get started by reviewing your resume. If you need this editable template; Message me for the editable Word document. #qamanualtester #engineer #cybersecurity #softwareqa

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If my team had $1 for every time someone said that they were lucky to have a technical writer embedded on the team, we’d all be millionaires! 🚀 For many companies, technical writers are not embedded into engineering teams. They probably should be, here’s why and how you should do it: Read more: https://lnkd.in/eJmuP8XK #technicalwriting #techComm #techWriting #ContentStrategy #documentation #informationdevelopment #devrel #DeveloperRelations #DevOps

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OK, let's talk about Platform Engineering. Good grief. Platforming is a topic that has grown into a life of its own in tech, and not in a good way. I'm going to row against the current. Platform teams are an anti-pattern. If your developers don't know how to properly provision and maintain infrastructure that is both supportable and minimizes cost and emissions, then you need better developers. Maintaining infrastructure in a consistent, supportable, optimized fashion does not require a team of people. A platform is not infrastructure nor is it the automation to maintain said infrastructure. A platform is a collection of APIs and messages that bind applications together. Again, this does not require a dedicated team of people. Platform teams are waste. Platform engineering is cover for justifying that waste. #platformengineering #platforms

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This got lost in my holiday inbox but this is *big* news for anyone who uses/creates with Claude....Claude can now be connected to the internet. One of the (many) reasons I'm a Claude stan is the fact that this is a company (Anthropic) that takes data privacy, security, and data integrity so seriously. I get it, to keep up with the AI arms race, the algo has to be connected to the data source. My hope is that Anthropic/Claude can cling on to those values (for dear life) while still bringing us the same high quality user experience. #AIInnovation #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #AITrends #TechInnovation #FutureOfAI #AIEthics #AIStrategy #BusinessAI #TechLeadership #AITransformation #EmergingTech #AIRevolution #InnovationStrategy #DataScience

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Quick thoughts on the state of QA hiring as we wrap up 2024. You can still find rockstars, but it’s harder than ever. I genuinely don’t know how a startup or busy enterprise team would find the time to do this. On average, we spent 97 hours to find a candidate we’re ready to offer to. This is up from prior years. Here’s a super quick/rough breakdown of the time spent: Initial Screening: 1500 minutes (30 seconds per) for 3000 candidates. Sending Messages: 750 minutes (3 min per) for 250 candidates. Review Tech Evaluations: 960 minutes (8 min per) for 120 candidates. First Interviews: 1800 minutes (60 min per) for 30 candidates. Second Tech Evaluations: 120 minutes (15 min per) for 8 candidates. Final Interviews: 720 minutes (180 min per) for 4 candidates. Total Time Spent: 97.5 hours for a single hire. Biggest shift in 2024? The rise of AI-driven application practices. This is based on two key observations: 1. A huge spike in applications when a job is posted, with significantly lower response rates from candidates in that spike. 2. More tech evaluations being dumped into AI tools like LLMs for solutions and then submitted regardless of whether it works. What’s more troubling: many candidates can’t explain the code they “wrote.” This highlights a critical AI risk: even when correct, humans must understand the solution to catch errors when it isn’t. The good news? The right candidates see tremendous opportunity in QA as a career path. They know that embracing and mastering new technologies can create real value. Thoughts on navigating this evolving hiring landscape? Would love to hear them! #QA #Hiring #TechRecruitment #AI #CareerDevelopment

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🚨 We're hiring a head of engineering at Warmly,! Who's the best of the best you know? Offering a $5,000 referral bonus for direct intros to someone we hire. You can comment them in directly and then intro We're looking for an engineering leader who's highly technical and scaled a team and product during a period of hypergrowth, $4MM to $30MM+ in ~ 2 years or something similar Our app engineering team is based in the US/Brazil. Meet our Tech Leads Marcos Cury & Scott O'Connor. Our data engineering team is based in Israel. Meet Uri Steinfeld and Dror Ventura brought in from our acquisition of Immagnify (acquired by Warmly). And our QA team is based in Pakistan. Meet Muhammad Ali Arif and Abeer Khan). They're welcome to work out of anywhere. Though we all work US hours. And we have quarterly company off sites - most recently in Mexico City, Greece, and Austin Texas! Our system is complex but resilient. We process millions of real-time website visits/day, orchestrate tens of thousands of automated AI sales & marketing campaigns/day and sync hundreds of customer’s CRMs and email platforms. We move quickly but deliberately. Design, product, and engineering collaborate to come up with the best solutions. It's never a should we build it question, it's a "this vs that" question. Looking for 10x solutions, not just 2x. As a member of the exec team, they'd be part of all the top level decisions we make as a company. No politics here. Just efficient business decisions. We're all humble, open minded, and want every other member of the exec team to win. Know anyone that comes to mind?

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Having a ton of fun writing an ORM for V2 of Case Kit. Typescript has such an incredible type system. I have autocompletion for column names, the ability to include relations, relations of relations, etc etc etc... all returning properly typed data (no classes in sight). It's been really satisfying seeing it coming together, and it's been great getting my hands dirty with some (relatively) complex generics. And to head off the obvious question… why aren’t I just using Prisma? Well there’s a couple of things I’m doing differently that I think are marginally better: there’s no code generation involved here, it’s just types (inspired by Drizzle); there’s no Rust binary you need to deploy, and it hews much closer to Postgres behaviour and syntax (the aim here is not to abstract away which database you’re using). But the real blocker to me using Prisma was that its extensions don’t support modifying queries of nested relations - a hard requirement for me due to the way I have multitenancy and soft deletes set up. It’s not shown in the video but the Case Kit ORM lets you write simple middleware that will be applied to every level of a nested query. Perfect for setting timestamps or adding clauses on tenant id or things like that.

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Keep it simple! While there's a need for tools in TA (candidate experience anyone?). It can end up costing more when tools don't talk or function to your needs. Maybe it's too difficult to understand, or too many logins. You need all your users on board, and on the same page. Get everything you need in one with Screenloop's ATS.

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I just spoke with two members today that have landed offers with us this morning and thought I would share some interesting findings. A lot of people that are on the product manager job hunt right now feel that salaries are at an all time low and that’s really a myth. The first offer we help our members land is usually a pretty low offer, but its the second and usually the third offer where our members see the benefit of our coaching program; because that’s where the biggest offers are presented. You will be amazed how much more relaxed you are when you aren’t fighting for your basic needs of food, water, and shelter anymore. This is actually when you can take the time to focus on the interviewers, because it’s really hard for you to not come off as desperate job hunter when YOU ARE ACTUALLY DESPERATE. You have money going out the door with rising living costs and nothing coming in. If you add a mortgage or child to that dynamic and anybody would be off their rocker. PS Is this the right thing for the employer though, when you take a job just to leave? Yes and no, but my wager is that you will get over that feeling real fast; because all of my members get an awesome counter offer when they quit their job. So, why didn’t they offer you that number in the first place? Protect yourself at all times and most importantly of start a side hustle. #ProductManagement #CareerOpportunities #AIProductManager #LeaveNoProductManagerBehind

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If you're a Test/QA manager struggling to do more with less, this 15-second read is for you. You're not alone and it's not a surprise. 7 out of 10 companies we talk with are on a hiring freeze plus no backfills. But workload is not the same. Companies are finding innovative ways to increase revenue during these tough times - that means new modules, more releases, more testing and guess what? - with same or less resources. If you're stuck in this loop big time, DM me and we'll perform a free audit to fix gaps in your QA process and unlock bandwidth. #copious #katalon #testing

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People burn out when they cant deliver on the mission because of constraints. There are 3 rules to follow: 1. TMI5 - Tell me like I'm 5 - this is how to clarify the mission. 2. YAGNI - You Aint Gonna Need It. Get rid of any overheads or cumbersome processes. 3. DIMI - Do It like you Mean It - passion first. These drive innovation, transformation and success.

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Organizations who haven't mastered basic #DevSecOps are not going to be successful in consolidating people and process around a #Platform team - they will have the same problems but will have a different org. The second point that is highlighted is that some naive orgs. see creating a Platform team as the goal. They are not stating nor tracking the outcomes they want to see - faster delivery, happier more productive developers, less churn and burnout, etc. This should be no surprise - we see this pattern with every new wave of technology, process, architecture.

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The notion “everyone is responsible for quality” is a good idea. Unfortunately, that idea has been turned into a empty slogan. How? Why? Quality is a set of relationships, neither a thing in itself nor a property of something. Quality is value to some person(s), at some time, with respect to some set of dimensions or criteria. As Aaron points out, anyone who is making a product (or any part of a product—which is also a product) or providing a service is presumably doing so to bring something of value to people who matter. You won’t hear very many people say “Quality? My stuff doesn’t have to satisfy anyone. I don’t care about quality; that’s someone else’s job.” These days, so it seems, lots of people conflate *quality* with *testing*. People give testing confused and confusing titles like “quality engineering” or “quality assurance. Many people called “quality coaches” are focused on coaching teams in testing. The hidden message seems to be: whatever you do, don’t say the T word! Testing is not the same thing as quality; not at all. Testing is evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing, exploring, and experimenting. That includes a lot of other activities snd ideas and principles — risk analysis, critical thinking, data wrangling, recording, reporting, collaboration… And yes, it includes applying tools whenever they help with specific mechanizable tasks. Whatever else it is, testing is not a means of engineering quality; testing is a means of evaluating or assessing quality. We don’t confuse diagnosis with health. We know that weighing yourself and blood tests don’t make you healthy. Why do we confuse testing with quality? Testing isn’t quality engineering, but testing supports engineering by determining whether there are problems that matter to people who matter. Part of deciding whether something will satisfy people is to discover how it might dissatisfy them. The first step towards making something better is to find out where it might present problems — where it might need to be better. But testing alone doesn’t make the product better; weighing ourselves doesn’t reduce or increase our weight, and the blood test doesn’t heal us. One of the comments to Aaron’s post suggests that if quality is everyone’s responsibility, maybe we should get rid of roles and labels — as Kent Beck originally and mistakenly suggested in the early days of the Agile movement. (He acknowledged the mistake fairly quickly.) People ignore the fact that roles (and labels that describe them accurately) help to focus responsibilities, commitments, and skills. Roles need be neither prisons nor fortresses. “Everyone is responsible for quality” *really means* “everyone is responsible *to someone* for making or doing *something*—and is responsible for the quality of *that work* or *that product* and *those relationships*.” In that light, labeling a particular role or group as “quality engineering” is misleading and unhelpful. Let’s avoid that.

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You're doing DevOps wrong. Yes, you. If your DevOps team acts like a renamed Ops team, you're doing it wrong. If you *have* a DevOps team, you're *probably* doing it wrong. The original promise of DevOps was a twofold assault on the original Ops/Dev split that saw Dev going to Ops to either beg for resources or hand over software for delivery by 1) integrating the two better, 2) automating what could be automated, in part as a result of better integration. But so often I see DevOps acting as a renamed Ops team, with barriers up, working on artifacts handed over from Dev. Here's a real example, with the guilty parties obscured: - Imagine a setup where the developers check in keys (eww...) - Instead of fixing that, devops runs a scrubber and ensures those keys don't make it into images. They're still on Github. - Imagine 5 different config file parsers, and instead of working integrated with Dev (where the developers are *unware* of this situation) and figuring out who will fix that (could well be a Devops engineer), they put in place scripts to generate config files in 5 slightly different formats, put the files in different locations, using different naming conventions. - Imagine a dozen services using half a dozen different names and formats for database connection details, and DevOps (you guessed it) not fixing that, but using templates and generators to work around it. This is a symptom. And what it is a symptom of if a culture where DevOps goes "not our table" when they see a mess left behind by Dev that isn't even always apparent to Dev, because DevOps has a birds-eye view of all services. Dev *should* also do, so that was a different dysfunction in that company, but fix the Dev/DevOps failure to integrate and you'd get that fixed too, for "free". When you see signs that DevOps are working around Dev deficiencies, don't be like Those People above: - DevOps should never "work around" Dev issues. They have Dev in their name too - they should work with the Dev team, embedded/seconded if needed - to fix them at source. - DevOps needs to educate. They're a stakeholder. Requirements that makes operations easier to automate need to make it into *development* project plans from the start. DevOps needs to work alongside development, or as *part* of the Dev team. If there's ever a hard handover point, it's a sign of lack of sufficient integration. The easiest way of improving this is often to not have a DevOps team, but have DevOps engineers being part of the development organization, possibly with some matrix management if you're large enough to warrant it. Having a separate DevOps organization *can* work - I have seen it work - but it requires a lot more discipline to prevent the old walls from being built back up again. (who here is old enough to have handed over a 100+ page manual and a build to an ops team that'd come back with a marked-up manual to tell you which steps didn't work, for you to fix before they'd try again?)

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I canceled a weekly 1:1 with a direct report. Why? 🎯 Their KPIs were on track. 🌟 They were thriving in their role. 💡 I had no immediate value to add. So why hold the meeting just for the sake of it? Why waste their time because I feel the need to constantly check in? This is where macro-managing comes in. It’s the opposite of micro-managing, and it looks like this: ✨ They work when and where they’re most productive ✨ You provide the tools, resources, and insights ✨ You remove obstacles and distractions from their path ✨ They decide the "how" ✨ You trust them to get it done The result? You empower. You support. Then you step back. In other words, you mind your own business so they can focus on theirs. How do you build trust in your teams? Share your experiences below 👇 #LeadershipDevelopment #MacroManagement #TrustYourTeam #thesandeepanand #TeamEmpowerment #GrowthMindset #Leadership #CareerDevelopment

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Tip for my fellow leaders when giving interviews: Ask slowly and take your time asking folks a question, even think of some example responses to share so they know what you have in mind. This is not because we want to take it over or like to hear ourselves talk, but give the candidate plenty of time to think of an answer. When I focus on this, their responses tend to be much more clear and I learn a lot more about them.

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