After my last post, I had a few queries as to what it meant. Last Monday I got told my job was being made redundant. As a consequence for the past two weeks I've been in a consulation period. It's been very unsettleing as we were left hanging for the first week, with no idea of what jobs were even available within the company to possibly transfer to. I'd mentioned it to a few people in Birmingham.pm, and although I got lead for a potential role near Birmingham, I decided to apply for two roles at ML.
Following my internal interviews yesterday, I've been offered the role of QA Automation Analyst. An unusual role in that I'm going to be looking at ways to enable the automation of current test procedures, so we can have complete regression tests running overnight, allowing the testers to concentrate on edge cases and the like. It's pretty much going to be a similar excise to automating CPAN Testing, so I should be quite suited to it. I've been surprised that there isn't already some sort of automation, as it's been talked about for some time. I guess they've just needed someone like me to be around to take advantage of :)
It will add more validity to me going to conferences, talking about testing, and being involved in testing workshops, etc, so that makes me happier. If I'd stayed in a traditional development role, it might have been more difficult to justify several people going to YAPC::Europe. This way it'll just be me from the QA department.
The first interview was an odd experience, with a development manager, HR manager and a software engineer from the development team. Of the 4 of us I had the longest service (of 4 years) here at ML! I could perhaps explain the history of the company better than any of them, from first hand experience. Still I think I did myself justice, although I now know my C skills leave alot to be desired, seeing as I've pretty much forgotten everything I ever learnt. After 15 years I used to be a very decent C programmer too. I think part of my future should include learning C++, as it holds alot more opportunities here at ML, and in other jobs that I've seen too. Plus it always looks nice on the CV to have a decent list of programming languages :)
Feel your body melt
Mum to mud to mad to dad
Dad diddley office, Dad diddley office
You're all full of ball
Dad to dam to dum to mum
Mum diddley washing, Mum diddley washing
You're all full of ball
Let me hear your lies, we're living this up to the eyes
