| Sr. Quality Assurance Eng |
As in most cases, when I first started at Kronos I had a great boss and
enjoyed my work. My boss was one of those who believed in doing "real"
quality assurance on a product, and not just going through the motions.
He believed in that so much that he would often battle it out with his
management telling them the "real" state of the product (DCM- Data
Collection Manager was what I was working on at that time) and that the
product wasn't ready to be shipped.
Eventually, because he was a squeaky wheel in a culture that generates
crappy products by doing little planning, testing, or real research, he
was the odd man out, and subsequently he was laid off because of it. He
just couldn't get those crappy products out fast enough. Once he left
Kronos I was absorbed into the WorkForce Central QA group where the
method of operation there is to do what your told no questions asked.
When management say's the product goes out the door....it goes out the
door whether your done testing or not....and if your not done
testing...just say you are.
It's a tough line to walk a Kronos because if you have any principles or
true beliefs in doing a quality job your a minority. If you believe in
doing the best QA job you can, then you'll end up working a lot of
overtime since the test schedules are usually unrealistic and way to
short and nobody else is going to kill themselves for it.
Instead it's much easier to just show up and go with the flow, do your
little amount of lame testing they give you, and go home.
So as for exciting work! Forget it....Kronos is not the place. If your
looking for a pay check Kronos may be right for you. The technology
used there in their products is not cutting edge. They have only had a
web product for about 3 years now so that should tell you something.
They are slow to adapt to new technology. Their current web product is
NOT J2EE compliant probably because they don't know what J2EE means?
The attitude at Kronos of just getting the product out is so prevalent
that I feel it is counterproductive. VP's are given huge bonuses for
putting crap out the door and not even the lowly QA person is going to
stop that product from going out. Middle management there are miracle
workers....if they sit around long enough they can justify shipping a
product that won't even start up! They do their "risk" assessments
which coincidentally almost always say the product is ready to ship!
These people are amazing to watch...I have to laugh. Good thing they
don't make medical equipment!
If you do find a serious bug late in the game....your almost looked upon
negatively for doing your job which for me was Quality Assurance .
Here is an example of that, I found a pretty good bug on an older part
of the product that had some work done to it. It turns out that the bug
I found had been in the product for almost two years and the previous
person who tested this area didn't find it. I found this problem maybe
two weeks before the scheduled ship date. After reporting the problem,
my new manager stopped by and asked ME why I didn't find it earlier? Now
remember, this is a problem that had been in the product for over a year
and I had only been testing this area of the product for about a week.
What does that tell ya? Sounds to me like I should have kept my mouth
shut because I was jeopardizing some VP's Bonus!!!
The QA hours at Kronos aren't to bad since they aren't totally sincere
about their quality standards, they don't do extensive permutations of
testing, and if your not done doing your testing, you can get in trouble
telling them that, so do like everyone else does there and say..."yeah,
my testing is done" and go home for the night. You do have to go
through the motions...don't get me wrong. But complacency rules in the
QA department. QA there is just a big rubber stamp! Makes it "look"
like QA is being done!
Sometimes, since Kronos always ships on time (which if you think about
it means they must be cutting corners somewhere?) they will ask you to
come in on a Saturday or two to "do some testing". When they do ask you
to work OT, the fact of the matter is, the product (WorkForce Central
was what I last worked on) is having some serious problems and now were
into fire fight mode cause the product HAS TO GO OUT ON SUCH AND SUCH A
DAY for a VP to get his/her bonus.
Kronos middle management will never ask you sincerely your opinion of
the product's quality, nor do they care to even hear you offer
it...unless of course you lie and say "the product looks awesome."
Dress code, is pretty relaxed.
You can advance if your a "yes" man/women. You know....they ask you to
get blood from a stone and you say..."yeah, I think I can do that." So
you get your group of people together to put together some piece of crap
product that can barely stand on it's own and you tout it like it's the
next super duper bread slicer. As long as they can sell it they don't
care, by the time the customer realizes it's a piece of crap, they'll
have the next version available for them to upgrade to which will shut
them up.
Here's another story to get my point across. A friend of mine was
needing a job badly with the recent down turn in the economy. I told him
all about Kronos and how lame it was. But I said "hey, take it for a
little while and when the economy get's better you can leave.". So he
inteviewed and got the job.
His job was write Segue silk code which for those who don't know is
automated testing code.
He lasted there maybe 5 months. He found all kinds of placed in
thier "test harness" the scripts would bomb out, or not really test
anything so he tried to fix these as best he could. He reported to
someone else and his boss told him he wasn't putting test code out fast
enough....meaning, he wasn't putting out crap!
At this point he had had enough of the stupidity that prevails there and
just quit. He tried and did fix a lot stupid, half-done things they did
just to give the elusion that they were doing good testing. But they
did't want that.....Noooooo, you just put out crap like everyone else
and stop trying to be a star!!! You see middle managment is forced to
get unrealistic things done in a give time period. The only way to do it
is to generate crap code that often doesn't really test anything. So
it's just all about numbers!!!
I have so many stories of the complacency that I could write a book
entitled "The demise of Quality Software in America...especially at
Kronos!" and all in the name of getting a product out the door....on
schedule!
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