May 20, 2002
quality of quotas
I was talking with my friend Jazz a few years ago. She'd gotten a QA job working for some start-up; me, I was still floundering through my career transition crisis, and reaching desperately for any information that could have a conceivable impact on my future. It occurred to me to consider QA (that's Quality Assurance, for the elucidation of the innocent) as a career after the following exchange.
Me: "Does it pay well?"
Jazz: "Yes."
To a musician on a $16,000/year budget in the high-priced slum district of San Francisco, this is more than adequate to get the blood rushing to the head. There are those who'd cavil by pointing out that the concept of "good pay" is relative. To these people, I would point out that in order to make $16,000 per year, a person would have to work 40 hours a week on $7.69 an hour. In this particular instance, "good pay" wasn't relative at all; there was, in fact, a presuptive baseline* from which to calculate all subsequent comparison. $8.00 an hour would have been a tremendous leap in financial reward. It would have been the eight-digit lottery as far as I was concerned.
Me: "So what does it entail, being a QA person? You basically find things that're broken, right?"
Jazz: "Sort of."
Me: "I could do that."
Jazz: "It's more like you look for things that can break, and break them."
Me: "Break things? I can do that. I'm good at that. I break everything."
Jazz: "Um."
Me: "So how do you go about doing that?"
Jazz: "Okay, let's see. How would you go about testing a trampoline?"
Me: "Jump up and down on it! Up and down, up and down, yay!!"
See, this is why I'm not a QA engineer.
With a long-suffering note in her voice, Jazz commented, "See, that's what ninety percent of people would say. QA engineers would look at a trampoline and say, okay, how much weight can we put on it until it breaks, and how does it break? What happens if we put it on a carpet as opposed to concrete? That sort of thing."
"Anal retentive," I summarized.
Jazz frowned over the phone. I heard her. "It's not so much anal retentive as it is just looking at things a different way," she said at last. Jazz is inherently incapable of agreeing with someone right off the bat. This is the lawyer in her. "You look at the specs and say, okay, this is how you claim it works, but what if the user does it this way? And you have to pick out all these stupid things that stupid users would do."
"I'm not a stupid user," I announced proudly. "I'm a smart user."
Back then, I didn't know that this was a contradiction in terms. One is either a user, or one is smart. One cannot be both. Jazz graduated from MIT with a Bachelors in Computer Science, and suffers from no trace of American Tact Disorder (not to be confused with Asian Tact Deficiency Disorder), wherein one tap-dances around unpleasant facts long enough that they die and shrivel away into hollow husks of old age. "No you're not," she said flatly. And that was that.
Fast forward several years later, to the cube in a warehouse where I'm performing my own retrospective version of QA. In the years between my technical innocence and today, I've discovered that I lack the anal rete -- excuse me, I meant to say the self-discipline -- to be a truly effective QA engineer. While I enjoy finding bugs, I also prefer to find them on the fly, without recourse to a schedule. I'm the kind of person that programmers hate, the bright-eyed, excited know-it-all that pops up over the cubicle wall waving a big piece of paper charting the existence of a hitherto Undocumented Feature*.
"People like you get fired," says Jazz, with that unerring charm and diplomacy that's become her trademark over the years.
I was sitting at a table with a group of coworkers at my new office, doing QA on the latest release of the application. Our Overlord entered bearing gifts: a stack of neatly stapled, collated checksheets of things to test and limits to stretch. "So-and-so from QA sent them to us," she said helpfully, and passed them around the room. We flipped through the stapled pages and discovered a catalog of Things To Test well over nine pages long.
"I'll start from the front," said one of my coworkers.
"In that case, I'll start from the back," said another one.
I flipped mine to somewhere in the middle and squinted. It looked dull. "I'll start in the middle," I offered brightly, and ignored all things written, henceforth.
Jazz was right, you know. QA pays quite well.
The latest stage of the Great Auto Purchase has been the task of looking for a decently priced auto loan, something with an interest rate of six to eight percent. "I can get a loan for 5.99%," said the Guy, cheerfully. "They won't even ask me what for. All I have to do is make a few phone calls and I'll have the money."
Thus armed with a baseline and the assurance that lenders weren't really very bright, I started to shop around.
The first stop was San Mateo Credit Union. I submitted an electronic application and received a phone call in a little under two hours.
"Hi!" said the cheerful, businesslike woman on the other end. "I'm processing Internet applications and I'm calling about your application for an auto loan!"
Everything she said was in exclamation points. I could see them at the end of her sentences, like little thumbtacks pinning each! application! to! her! board! "Wow, you guys are quick," I said, heaping praise on her head. Always good to try to butter up your loan agent before you get a quote. You never know.
"No problem!" she chirped. "It's a pleasure! So, you're interested in an auto loan for X dollars!?"
"Yes'm," said I, wringing my hat in hands. Metaphorically, that is. "Could you tell me the interest rate on a loan of that size?"
"We can give it to you with a maximum of 36 months for repayment!" she exclaimed, apparently feeling it a cause for congratulations. "Your interest rate will be only 10.90%!"
I gagged.
She heard me.
"What year is the car?!" she wanted to know.
"1997," I said, weakly. "10.90%?"
"See, if it had been five years or older, it would be 7%!" she explained brightly. "If it was four years or older, it would be 6.90%!"
I blinked at the phone. "The older it is, the higher the interest?" I wondered blearily. "Wait a minute." 1997. 1998. 1999. 2000. 2001....something wrong there. "Did you say 7%--?"
As chance would have it, my email abruptly burped at me. My presence was needed! it beeped impatiently. What are you doing on the phone?! Attend to me! me! me! immediately!
I promised to call the loan officer later -- "Sure! 9 to 5:30, except for tonight!" -- and sat down to deal with work, all the while attempting to do math in my head. (2002 minus 1997 is...and 7 = 10.90?)
*baseline - An impossible standard, set by optimists for a group of pessimists, given to realists to be overshot and undercut in the most expensive way possible.
*Undocumented Feature - Also known as a bug. A flaw. A mistake. An error. A screw-up. It sounds so much better to call it an Undocumented Feature; that way, when customers or managers show up demanding to know why one's application has seen fit to issue subpoenas to all males over the age of six with the letter 'E' in their last names, one can sit back and drawl, "It's an Undocumented Feature," with the comfortable awareness that no matter when the word "f*ck-up" enters the conversation, it won't be you that introduces it.