
Reviving a 19 Year Old Test to See If an Employer Is Worth Working For - ardme
https://alcamine.com/blog/reviving-a-19-year-old-test-to-see-if-an-employer-is-worth-working-for
======
mikece
It's absolutely shocking how many companies don't understand how important
these points on the Joel Test are. I forget who made an amended version of
this list to change "best tools money can buy" to "giving developers wide
allowance in buying tools and hardware which make their job easier. Sometimes
this is a 3rd or 4th monitor; sometimes it's a $1500 chair that is so
comfortable and makes back pain disappear so that one can concentrate on a
feature/bug fix for hours without needing to get up and stretch (yes, a
personal thing for me), or non-standard-issue software/tooling like GitKracken
or RedGate or BeyondCompare or Sublime Text....

Managers complain about spending so much money that's not in the budget but
how much does turnover cost you in terms of lost productivity and recruiting
fees?

(And speaking of recruiting fees: why are companies willing to pay $20k or
more to recruiters but only a $500 for a referral from current employees?
Recruiters in the midwest pay $1000 or more for referrals who get hired --
companies are telling their employees that it's in their interest to tell
their qualified friend/lead to contact the recruiter instead of doing an
internal referral.)

~~~
brador
What's the standard issue alternative of sublime text?

------
eesmith
I would like to hear some comments about: "I like having dedicated testers on
my team but many places don’t anymore and if you have a good process in place
for automated testing you can do just fine."

In the 1990s, I recall (perhaps wrongly) one of the Microsoft books talking
about one tester for every two developers.

At the tail end of the 1990s, I worked as a developer in a group with a QA
team, and they caught bugs, including ones where it took me a while to even
see there was a bug. Which means that I couldn't have written the tests for
them.

Nowadays, I do consulting/contract programming, and my clients always do
manual testing of what I shipped them, before signing off on the payment.
That's in addition to the unit tests I write. And they find bugs.

So, what does it mean "if you have a good process in place for automated
testing you can do just fine"? Does it mean that it's okay to let your users
be your QA group, since there's a process for handling that?

Or is it something else I don't know about, given that I'm a one-person
developer?

~~~
mikece
Dedicated testers can be quite skilled at figuring out ways to break software
(sometimes annoyingly so). As a dev I'm usually thinking of how to make my
apps work, not how to make them fail.

Unit tests: certainly good, but on one team I recall there being the phrase
that a good integration test was worth 1000 unit tests: if the individual
parts work but they don't work together correctly as a whole system then what
practical value was our unit test?

~~~
bradknowles
The unit tests and integration tests serve different primary functions. There
may be some overlap, but if you’re good at writing them, then you already know
about that and can minimize that.

