GitLab GitLab Advanced Software Engineering Course, 1 Mar 2021

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From YouTube: Interview with a GitLab Software Engineer in Test

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Interview with a GitLab Software Engineer in Test

A

Mark how are you doing today.

B

Yeah good thing sharif how you doing I.

A

Am good, I am good happy tuesday, or should I say wednesday for you? Yes, indeed,.

B

Yes day and thank you stay right across the time zones yeah.

A

Yes, well, thank you for uh agreeing to participate in this interview session, we're doing uh with morehouse college. So, uh first and foremost, can you introduce yourself to the students and tell us a little bit about where you're from, in your background.

B

Joking, my name is mark lapierre, I'm living in melbourne, australia, although I did live in the u.s in pennsylvania for a few years, and I work at good lab as a senior software engineer in test in the quality department. I also have a phd in psychology.

A

Nice, oh so is there overlap between the two? No.

A

All right well good to know all right. It's wonderful just to hear the different backgrounds of people here who work at gitlab right because they're so varied, so yeah as someone who's a software engineer. um How did you first hear about software development? Take us through that process. Take us back a few years and what were some of your initial thoughts about something.

B

Yeah, so that's that's really difficult. There wasn't really any single event: I've been using computers, practically my entire life, so back in primary school here in australia, I used to go down to the local library and wait for my mom to pick me up after school and they had a computer there, and so I started using that and then I started getting into software and writing programs in basic teaching myself.

B

So I knew about software development from a very young age, but in terms of a career that would have been while working at a telco in australia. I was working in technical support and I started working on a few web development projects there so yeah that was that was kind of my introduction through web development, um yeah learning learning how to make tools and ways of organizing information that the telco needed interesting.

A

So when you went off to college in australia, were you a computer engineer.

B

So yeah I I I studied computer science and at that point I was already working at the telco, but in the textbook role, but by the time I graduated I had become a web developer in a product development team, so yeah I already effectively had a software development job. By the time I graduated.

A

Nice, so so tell us a little bit about how you move from web development to the actual software engineering piece of it. What sort of brought on that transition for you? That.

B

That was complicated, uh so I actually got a bit disillusioned with that web development role. I was the most senior member of a two-person team and when I joined that team, I knew nothing about web development. So being the most senior member really didn't uh set me in a good position to progress, my career, and so I left there and decided to change.

B

I didn't see many opportunities at the time, simply because I wasn't aware that they existed, and so I changed my path and went down a science career. I've always been interested in science and uh people and how the brain works, and so that's why I took on the course in psychology, but uh once I finished that course I decided being a researcher wasn't for me, one of the great things about software development is that we have really rapid feedback cycles.

B

That's especially more the case now with agile methodologies and that's something you don't get in science.

B

So you know I can do effectively do an experiment in software development and get the answers immediately, whereas in science it takes months, if not years, right yeah, and so I went back to software development um by that time, many years have passed and I've learnt more of the opportunities uh yeah and and got involved in a insurance firm got a job there in the testing team, a testing team- and that's where I got back into software development as a test automation, engineer.

A

So help me understand that how many years did you take off, then between, like when you went and down the path towards psychology and pursuing that? What was the gap in terms of years between you exiting software development or exiting uh doing things with the web and then picking up software development again.

B

That was uh about a six year process.

A

Six year process: okay, so how had the industry changed in those six years? What new skills did you have to require.

B

uh So um by then, my programming skills were extremely rusty. Fortunately, I'd done some programming. uh In my studies I had to design and develop experiments and they were computer-based.

B

So I think that helped me to get through the interviews um yeah. The interviewers knew that I hadn't completely lost my programming skills, but I had to learn new languages. I had to be prepared to learn new languages and I had to demonstrate that the skills that I've learned in science were still were also applicable, and so it really helped that I could focus on my problem. Solving and troubleshooting skills the ability to develop a project from an idea to its implementation and handle all of the aspects of that yeah. But.

A

uh That's some that's intense, that's intense. Did you think about going back to school again for engineering in any sort of capacity or you just said you know what I'm just going to dive right back in in the professional world.

B

Yeah yeah, I was relying on my prior experience, um distant though it was. I was relying on that to get me in. I had had enough of study at that point. I had already done an undergraduate degree that was three years taken break while working and then the five-year psychology degree. um So that was enough study for me. Gotcha gotcha.

A

Thank you for that clarification. So then, let's now talk about this first job that you get now um once you decide to go back into software engineering, what were you doing? Yeah.

B

Yeah, so that was so different from my previous experiences um there I applied for a role as a software developer, and at that point I only knew software development and web development, and so the role was a java developer.

B

But when I got to the interview I spoke with the manager of the quality team, it wasn't called the quality team, but that's how I knew them at that point and um he was interested in what I could bring because of my involvement in science.

B

What that team did was they solved problems for other teams and they helped those other teams, apply quality and testing processes to improve their work on their products and features, and so what this team that I eventually joined would do is we would get involved in another team when they wanted to start something new and get it started well and we'd help them to implement good quality and testing practices and we'd help them to learn the tools that they would need or to learn improvements to the tools that they were currently using and learn how to use the testing framework that we had a base framework that we uh implemented in any new project, and we taught them how to use that project, how to use that framework well and how to add to it how to write tests, how to maintain them all that sort of thing.

B

So we were more of a mentoring team rather than the typical quality team that just writes tests. Okay,.

A

And how long did you do that role for.

B

That was a little under a year um before I went to the us yeah so.

A

B

There for very long, but I learned so much and I think I learned more there because of the experience they had and just the great team that they were. I learned more there than I had in my entire career to that point: okay, so nice yeah! It speaks to the importance of having people who you can look up to absolutely and learn from and that's the same media lab it's yeah.

A

Absolutely so, can you tell me a little bit about your current role at gitlab yeah, my.

B

Current role is very similar, funnily enough, so a lot of the role does involve helping other teams to improve their quality processes, but also writing tests with a focus on end-to-end tests.

B

Part of part of quality, though part of helping other teams to develop their quality practices, is encouraging and helping software developers to own quality to own the quality of the product and of what they're working on, and so we try to help them to write their own tests and maintain their own tests, but also we fill in the gaps where we can, but a large part is split between writing code for testing and quality frameworks and tools, scripts and automation, tools of a variety of kinds, but also helping to improve processes throughout the organization, with a focus on improving the quality of the product.

B

A

Okay, so give me an idea of how this relates to the end user.

B

A

B

um So part of the process, the iterative process of developing features is getting feedback from users and customers when they have an idea. So if a customer opens an issue with a feature proposal, uh I will be involved in considering the testing plan for that, and so I might have questions for the customer on what they would like and what concerns they might have about, how the future might work and what risks they might see.

B

I will also be involved if a customer has a problem. Sometimes a customer there might be a pretty pretty uh um sometimes show stopping bug, sometimes less severe, but certainly if there is a bug, that's complicated.

B

uh I, as part of quality team, might get involved in developing testing plans and procedures to make sure that we don't see something like that again in the future. Gotcha.

A

Okay, thank you. Thank you for that clarification. So, let's take us back to when you were first sort of looking at gitlab or maybe git lab reached out to you. What was it? Do you think that made you attractive ultimately to get to gitlab.

B

Yeah I looked at gitlab um and I think I think it was helpful. uh I did say at the start that psychology didn't really relate to uh my current role but um yeah.

B

I learned a lot of skills in science that are very applicable to uh testing and software development as a whole, so problem solving skills, project management skills, the ability to learn things quickly, but also dive in deeply when given the opportunity, so I think, having done a course in psychology through to a phd, I that was evidence that I surely must have learned a lot of these skills and it was important.

B

I think, that doing a phd means of doing a lot of work on my own right and I didn't have any experience working remotely previously so joining a relatively new team. uh I think it would. It would have reassured those hiring me that I could work well on my own remotely with their guidance. Of course,.

A

Right right, so how long have you been with gitlab now, uh almost three years in those three years? What skills have you picked up at gitlab? I've.

B

uh I've improved a lot of the skills that I've developed, so my career had been quite long at that point and varied, uh so I've continued to improve my problem-solving troubleshooting skills, but I think uh one thing that gitlab has given me is the opportunity to work more in teams.

B

So a lot of my previous career had been on my own or as part of a small team being one of the most senior people and at bitlab. That is not the case anymore.

B

I'm working with a lot of people with a lot more experience than me or as much experience or a lot of different experience, and so I've been able to improve my ability to work with others and identify the skills that other people can bring to fill in, for when I don't have those particular skills uh and the results have been so much better than the previous experience.

A

Nice, nice, so if you could travel back in time, what would you tell your 20 year old self.

B

uh There are opportunities out there and yeah do do what you can to find them. Unfortunately, at the time there wasn't there really wasn't even an internet, so my 20 year old self was not aware of the opportunities that existed and it was really hard. It would have been really hard to define them, but now a quick search and you'll find so much more information that I didn't have, but also resources like linkedin.

B

There are a lot of developers who are willing to have a chat about their current role, and so I thought I think that would have been really good for me to just talk to people who are in the role that I was interested in or working in then and find out what other opportunities there are so yeah. I think my biggest piece of advice would be to find out what opportunities exist. Learn about them before making a decision before committing to something you don't have to commit too early yeah.

A

So would you give that same advice to the students who are watching this now.

B

Yeah yeah, there are a lot of opportunities out there. um Yeah take the time to learn what what there is that you could do.

A

Absolutely, and how do you see the industry transforming over the next few years and what advice would you give to these students who are watching this.

B

I think um so yeah machine learning is big and continues to get bigger. um So there's been such a huge transformation in things like search it's and it's it's a big part of everyone's lives. Now, even if we don't realize it any time we use search anytime, we use google maps or whatever we're using machine learning, uh even when we're browsing the web, we're being targeted by ads that are driven by machine learning. uh So yeah it's hugely important and I think we'll continue to be so learn about that also learn about data data.

B

Science is a big thing and you can't have effective machine learning without data science, and I think people who will be look for the people that companies will be looking for will be the ones who can work with data really well.

B

So you can get an off the shelf tool now that anyone with a bit of software development knowledge can implement. You can just plug in some data, get some results but to get really good results. You need to understand the data that you're feeding in and you need to understand how to make use of the results that you get out, and that requires.

A

B

About data data science and data skills that some people might not have and that you might not pick up in a general software development course unless you choose to focus there, and I think those skills will be very important.

A

Great advice, I'm in complete agreement with you- that is a great advice for these young students well well, mark I that was. That was the last question that I had was there anything else you wanted to offer up.

B

Yeah, no, no! I I think that covers it. I think um yeah, it's really important to um consider your options to to learn all skills. I think one thing that has helped me throughout my career is being able to learn new skills and being interested in continuing to develop my own skills and also being interested in improving my interpersonal skills. So there's the technical side, which gets covered a lot, but hopefully these days, there's more focus on interpersonal skills as well, because they are so essential.

B

I do interviewing as part of my role as well and that's a big focus of the interview. The technical side gets covered as well, but even during technical interviews, I'm constantly thinking of how this person works with others. How this candidate will be a part of the team, what it will be like to work with them, and so developing those interpersonal skills is hugely important.

A

Agreed agreed once again well, thank you mark. This has been great.

B

Yeah, thank you. Sharif.

A

Appreciate the time that you've, given us, have a great day, you too all right. Thank you.