161: The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide with John Sonmez

John is a hold nothing back kind of guy and reveals everything he knows about leading a successful career, getting and staying in shape, and retiring young, in his latest book “The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide: How to Learn Programming Languages Quickly, Ace Your Programming Interview, and Land Your Software Developer Dream Job “

If you want to be more than an above-average developer and you want the ultimate short-cut to success, look no further than John's latest book.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Going From QA or Another Technical Role to Development – I decided to dedicate a whole chapter to this topic because it’s one of the most common questions I get asked. Making the transition from QA or some other technical role to being a software developer can be extremely difficult. I made the transition myself—in fact, I had to do it twice.
• Perhaps the biggest hurdle you will face in switching from QA or some other technical role into software development is the perceptions people have of you. Once you have a role within a company, people tend to always see you as that particular role, regardless of your skill set or how you grow.
  
• One of my first official jobs in the software development industry was that of a tester. Often new programmers don’t understand testing. They don’t think it necessary. The goal of testing software is not to find bugs or to make software better. It’s to reduce the risk by proactively finding and helping to eliminate problems which would most greatly impact the customer using the software.
• As a software developer, you should be concerned with quality more than anyone else. You can not have the mindset that QA will find the bugs in your code.Instead, you should absolutely make it your responsibility to find and fix the bugs before your code goes to testing. The reason is fairly simple. The further along in the development of software a bug is found, the more expensive it is to fix.
  
• QA is not the enemy. You actually have the same end goal: to produce high quality working software. Whatever notions you have of QA being the enemy, get rid of them now.
• Problems like this one can be resolved extremely easily, simply by talking to QA before you write any code and agreeing, together, on what is going to be tested.

Resources

• The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide: How to Learn Programming Languages Quickly, Ace Your Programming Interview, and Land Your Software Developer Dream Job 
• SimpleProgrammer
• PerfGuild

Connect with John Sonmez

• Twitter: @jsonmez
• Blog: SimpleProgrammer

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