“Are you an office person, or a home person?” might have been a weird question to ask in a job interview a couple of years ago, but as our relationship with jobs evolves, we begin to understand the different ways people see work, which have an immense weight in the ways we relate and engage with a particular organization.
Let’s think back for a second and ask ourselves: since the pandemic began, what was the biggest difference we felt working from home? It’s not difficult to imagine that everyone had a different reaction to this change: some found themselves missing the interactions of the office, while others found that working from home was an ideal arrangement, and a third group looked for a middle ground working at the office some days, and from home the others. So the question is: do you have a preference? Does that impact your work?
“The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest to master in business”, mentions this Forbes article analyzing this situation. “We often think of ourselves separate from the environment, the system, the culture, the work. In reality, there is very deep interconnectedness to our being.”
In other words, the environment in which we collaborate affects the results we have and is clear that people, as individuals, have personal preferences in the ways they work. And if that conclusion might seem obvious, it seemed to need the upheaval of a pandemic for many companies to start harnessing this newfound approach.
“It's a shift away from the one-size-fits-all approach of the past, where the work is designed (complete with open-plan offices, fluoro-lighting, 9:00 am starts and a five-day workweek) and then people are squeezed into it”, says an article published by the news network ABC. “But one size never really fits all.”
This gives us an idea: is it possible to ensure that a collaborator can have more control over the conditions of their work? Yes, and it’s becoming a topic of discussion everywhere, especially in Tech, where disruption of the status quo is the name of the game: Hyperpersonalization.
The rise of Hyperpersonalization
How do you prefer to work? Where? When? Why? Everyone has a different answer to these questions, so collaborating in an environment that takes them into account makes all the difference in our productivity. In software development, for example, this was already a trend before the pandemic, with things like having the option to work from home one day a week or offering different hours depending on personal preference becoming normal.
However, the pandemic came to be one of the final blows at our traditional “office hours”, with a big percentage of people discovering ways to work that they really couldn’t consider before, changing the way many organizations collaborate with employees.
“In the past, workplace strategists were able to assign flexible working ratios based on a team and its primary functions. With the mass-scale adoption of hybrid working, the preferences of employees coming into the office have become hyper-personalized. We can no longer assume an employee or team will be in on specific days due to their job function or demographic”, indicates the blog The Pulse about this trend.
And it’s easy to see how these circumstances might define the outcome of any given project. After all, are your most productive times the same as everybody else’s? Is your home the best place to get things done? Or do you like to be at home, but also have the option of an office for important meetings or access to better infrastructure if you need it?
“Hyper personalization is usually associated with marketing products and services to individual consumers — think about how Netflix builds up a profile of what you like to watch and uses that to suggest content to you or the way Spotify serves up new songs based on what you've listened to before — but it can also be applied to the workplace”, continues the ABC article about the topic. “The pandemic gave many workers a chance to dip a toe into the hyper-personalization waters.”
However, what does hyper-personalization actually look like in action? Because we must keep in mind that this concept encompasses lots of different elements, ones that go from the business you are working from, to the individual interests and affinities of each developer and collaborator.
“I’ve been part of some very long projects”, says Carlos Estrada, one of the Lead Developers at Scio. “And one time, after six or seven years with the same client, I told Rodimiro [Scio’s Service Delivery Manager and Co-Founder] that I just felt in a rut, doing the same thing every day. He understood and said he had a couple of projects I could help with during my “dead” hours at Scio. I liked that openness, and it helped me explore other types of tasks that I was interested in.”
As this anecdote shows, “hyper-personalization” doesn’t have to be a complete upheaval in a company; just being listened to and working with an organization open to making changes by offering options for different types of people, can go a long way. To this end, that same ABC article we quoted earlier gives us some questions to consider and discuss hyper-personalization, and define where you want to direct your career:
When and how do you work your best, and in what environment
What you find engaging and meaningful
Where your strengths lie
The ideal place of work and your desired mix of responsibilities
For example, while Scio is a Nearshore company with developers all over Latin America, which are permanent remote collaborators, for those locally in Morelia we plan to implement a “hybrid” model of work, where the week is divided between home and office days. Also, we offer different start and finishing times, in case you prefer something different than the traditional 9 to 6, and three days of PTO in case you need to take time off for any personal reason, among other options aimed at our collaborators as individuals who have different affinities and preferences.
“When it comes to creating the right culture of an organization and/or building an attractive brand, the question actually becomes how do we rethink our existence, policies, and structures so that it can reflect (as authentically as possible) some of our deepest values, ways of connecting and working?”, concludes Forbes.
And this last question is at the heart of it: the ways we connect as individuals with our jobs matter, so choosing an organization that understands, respects, and tries to implement measures to give collaborators some freedom to work as they see fit is invaluable to foster a healthy, engaged culture.
There are a lot of opinions about the best possible way of measuring productivity, but that can bring us to another question entirely: why measure it at all? In this second part of our interview with Adolfo Cruz, we dig into the reasons why measuring productivity is important for any organization.
By Scio Team
If you are adding value for a client during a product’s development, creating something they can use to attract more users or increase their profits, you may say the time invested in the process was productive, but how do you measure that? Can it be done?
Productivity can be witnessed, it happens right in front of you when a team is making progress, but translating that into data is not an easy task; it takes a lot of time and effort to get right, and it might take focus away from the resulting product, ironically affecting your productivity.
It’s similar to that quantum physics phenomenon where you could change the outcome of something by observing it; all the effort invested in getting exact numbers to measure productivity could make you neglect stuff that has value for the product developed, so you need to be very careful in how you implement measurements to not interfere.
So this begs a very important question: why measure productivity at all? You can see people in the software industry questioning that, going as far as suggesting it’s unnecessary, but we disagree. At Scio, we want to know if our engineers are offering real value to our clients, which is very important to us even if sometimes we use subjective, case-by-case measures to do so.
Measurements impact the way products are being developed
Reaching a standard that applies to everyone is complicated, and if you add the fact that some people may be working on different projects and products at the same time, with different challenges and rhythms, you get variables that complicate things further, so we guide ourselves by the idea of “We are productive if we add value to a business”. It’s a given that achieving working software is delivering promises, so it’s more about how a client feels about the products you are making.
The problem is trying to approach this with objectivity, but doling out numbers can have unintentional consequences; developers can over-focus on raising their numbers because the important metric seems to be proving your value with high stats, so it ceases to be a team and instead is just a collection of people making their figures go up. Metrics can bring improvements, but you also need to consider their context to make them helpful, which is why it’s difficult to find a universal solution to measure productivity in software development.
When we are in charge of managing a project, productivity is more focused on avoiding red flags instead of checking who is less productive in any given team, measuring it to avoid deviating too much from our goals; it’s easy to fall from a cliff if you aren’t careful with that. We are not interested in using metrics to know if everyone is achieving some arbitrary standard, but rather steering a ship, looking at the productivity of the team as a whole.
To this end, it’s useful to register the progress of every project and map them out to find general trends rather than trying to get exact figures. Robert D. Austin, the author of the book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, said that unless you can measure 100% of something, there’s no point to measure anything at all, but in most cases, you don’t need to have every single data point, just an educated guess about where the project is heading, helped with some metrics that give a clear perspective.
This can be seen in the sprints. With information about how many story points (the metric used to estimate the difficulty of implementing a given improvement) are completed, how many issues surface, how many are solved, and comparing it with past efforts, the red flags are obvious. If the team completed between 5 and 10 story points in a sprint, but only 1 or 2 the next one, you need to dig into the process; you might find some challenges nobody saw coming and had to be solved to move forward, and you didn’t need more than knowing past productivity to compare.
And often, if you are using Agile Methodologies, the team is the one that realizes when someone is struggling or is free to help and correct the issues themselves. A good team can manage itself, keeping productivity up without needing someone to check their progress daily. This also results in the quality of the product being directly embedded into the productivity of the process, as the team should already know at this point what needs to be measured to plan with the amount of flexibility necessary to succeed.
We help your team deliver more value to the business.
In software development, we could measure how many Final Users are aware of a specific feature, how many support tickets are being sent, how many things are misunderstood, or which things are not working as intended, converting it into data to know if there are issues during development, but you still need to take some subjective measurements, like conversations with the clients to know how they feel about the product, to give context to this information.
That’s the impact we want to have on our clients, and more often than not, they start seeing the benefits of these processes. They take the time to plan their sprints, properly assess the project, and address issues, especially with not very experienced clients, whom we show what a good software development cycle looks like.
After all, developing software is closer to creating art than manufacturing an object, so the question of productivity is similar. Just like writing a novel, it’s hard to estimate exactly how long each step is going to take because human beings are bad at estimating time and effort in the long run.
We take the time to understand your business and create custom software that helps you grow.
As we know how quickly things can change in a short amount of time, Scio typically plans short-term goals (between 1 - 3 months) and mid-term goals (between 6 - 12 months) at most when we work with our clients during the evolution of the product, in order to ensure it has enough room to grow naturally, focusing on the steps we need to reach a desirable outcome, and even then it’s a challenge to keep every detail under control. There have been occasions where we have to overhaul plans to finish a project in the timeframe we set, and in those situations, the final product is different from how we first envisioned it because of the natural evolution that a project goes through.
So planning way too into the future is highly risky, shorter steps with a clear idea of every milestone is a method that has shown us the best results to develop a product, which is one of the principles of the Scrum methodology; working with iterations that have defined starting and ending points, and progress is registered at every step.
And even then you can get slightly different results every time. Sometimes a team is very well attuned and can build things faster than a team mostly composed of new developers, or engineers who had never worked together before, so obviously they took a little longer, which is why Scio evolved to focus more on the value we are delivering to our clients, involving them more in the process, deciding together which features were more valuable, and the priorities to establish.
After all, always having the option to say “Okay, let’s stop for a bit, reorganize, plan better retrospectives, and find areas of improvement” depends on knowing your process back and forth, and that’s why measuring productivity is important.
Measuring productivity is hard, but it’s not impossible. It takes some general metrics and subjective questions dictated by human behavior that are never objective. That’s where Scio comes in - we design teams that fit with the culture and practices of our clients, ensuring that no matter what, we always have the necessary perspective to achieve a successful engagement. If you want help measuring your engineering team's productivity or just need someone to bounce ideas off of, send us a message. We love talking about this stuff!
Last time, we discussed the skill necessary to work remotely with Jesús Magaña, one of our Project Managers here at Scio. But, as you might think, setting up a home office is another story entirely. How to manage it? We hope this second part of our chat sheds some light on it.
by Jesús Magaña
Working from home is a challenge.
I spend most of my time on calls and video conferences. When the pandemic started and we had to go home, it was somewhat uncomfortable. “Oh, they are going to see my house”, or my wife or children would pass behind me inadvertently, or you would probably hear someone ringing the door or yelling, and other considerations you never had before, but you learn to deal with them day by day.
But after almost two years of that, I like the way we are working now. I feel the team is more productive and accomplishes a lot more, and although I miss the old office dynamic of arriving and greeting everybody by hand, remote work opened a ton of connections and made a lot of changes to my personal life.
I can have lunch with my kids every day.
For example, do you want to know something cool about working from home? I can have lunch with my kids every day. Just like everyone else, I used to eat out of a Tupperware container at the office, but now that hour also works as a break where I can spend more time with them.
Also, it’s an interesting feeling to be aware of how your kids see you while you work, and how you express yourself with the people you work with, even if you have your door closed. I think that for a Project Manager, it helps to be working in an environment like that. If you were not a very good PM, screaming at people and whose attitude is less than ideal to collaborate, would you behave the same way in front of your family?
People learn a lot by imitation, and promoting a good culture of working, is easier if they directly see you. It can also help you to detect some vices you may have when you realize you are about to do things you don’t want them to see you doing.
You see, one of my main responsibilities is transmitting the culture of Scio to our apprentices and every new person that joins the team. Culture can have an effect at home too because it is a similar process to teaching your kids the kind of attitudes you want to see in them.
So, if your kids see you dealing with people in a professional, empathic, and understanding way, they are probably learning something valuable about collaboration and relationships.
The home office can humanize a collaborator.
They can take a peek into your inner life, the things you have at home, the people there with you, and you can learn more about their hobbies that you may never know otherwise.
All these kinds of things give you more context about others, and you can generate more personal connections because, when you turn your camera on, you let them enter your home, and that shows the human side of your coworkers.
As you can see right now [during the Zoom interview], I have a blurred background, because I moved out recently and I don’t want all those boxes to show up and that, but that’s a normal part of a home office.
Still, the challenges go beyond that. In the beginning, when I started to work full time from my home, the balance between my personal and professional life was non-existent, “I’m already here, I don’t have anywhere else to go”, and without a clear line during the day at which to stop working.
Of course, I noticed that wasn’t right, but I still reached a limit. There was a certain feeling of tiredness when you don’t have a clear dividing line between both sides of my life; it was easy for me to stay an extra hour to finish late stuff, but I got to the point where I was just going through the motions the day.
And that affects your work. I started to become more easily distracted, and without that urgency I had in the office to finish stuff and go back home, getting burned out was easy. After all, I was already in my house and any concern about returning late had disappeared.
So I started changing my attitude about it, first by trying to schedule things to do in the afternoon and to always have something to do, be it just riding my bike, going for a run in the park, or things like that.
I try to be consistent with it, and disconnecting completely at the end of the day makes it easier, even if I have to play up the change of context by walking around the block or something when I finish? or start my day. It works for me and lets me know when my day has finished and if I should stop.
If someone asks me these days for advice about being a Project Manager, first I would like them to consider why they want to do this kind of work, to see if their idea of a PM is realistic. You are in a very critical position of responsibility, and I recommend they develop some great social skills and know the entire development cycle well.
These days, my routine is very well defined, and that’s important for someone who wants to follow this career path from now on. I spend all my morning on calls, updates, and client meetings, probably around 40% of my time goes into that, leaving the afternoon to deal with the specific needs of my team, from getting a new mac for them, to define parameters and functions of everyone involved. And after doing it all from the comfort of my own home, I cannot imagine doing it any other way again.
Even if the software industry is open for everyone with talent and dedication, women historically had to overcome more challenges to carve their own spaces. So we had a chat with Gilda Villaseñor about her work with Technovation, and the motivation to bring more women into this profession.
I was fortunate enough to never notice the idea that math was for men, and women should focus on areas like the Humanities. So when I was in middle school, I started playing chess, and I think that gave me a certain mindset that helped me identify or generate some complex scenarios in my head, and analyze them carefully.
I trained that part of my mind often, but without thinking of a specific professional area to apply it until my mom signed me up for a computer workshop. Both of my parents are doctors who worked at the IMSS (the Mexican healthcare system), and they had a coworker in the IT department that was always telling them about how computers were coming strong, and as they always had been curious about everything new, said: “Well, let’s get her into it to see what happens”.
I didn’t put any resistance to the idea, to be honest. Back then, my siblings had a very strong affinity for art, and they were always doing something related to it. It was something I wasn’t interested in at all, so I was the one that never had anything to do on weekends, and I joined that class.
Well, it turned out that I was good at the logic needed to write programs; they taught us how to write very simple procedural programs, but I realized that I understood those things quicker than all of my classmates and made things work faster when I was writing code. In the beginning, it was just a hobby, though, until I started high school and realized that I was better at the Computer class than the rest of my friends, so when I was finishing school, I decided I wanted to study something that could take me out of the city, and among my options were Computer Science, which was available at the Tecnológico de Morelia, but I wanted something different.
In the beginning, everything was fine, but during my last years of college and my first professional years, I started to notice very few women doing the same things as me, although I didn’t question it until I started hearing the stories of other women in the field. And it was when I reached a certain level when I noticed how my knowledge and experience were sometimes questioned without reason, and I wasn’t advancing as easily as my male colleagues, finding certain resistance to my authority when I started climbing up the hierarchy.
Also, having to decelerate my professional career when I chose to exercise my maternity, and the difficulty of having to juggle my job with taking care of my kids took a toll, as I couldn’t keep my rhythm the way some of my male coworkers could, which is part of the reason why I wanted to change things for myself and any woman working on this industry.
I started my volunteer work in an international program called Technovation. I was there between 2016 and 2019 until it had to stop because of the pandemic, and although I’m not active on that initiative right now, I am collaborating with others that try to bring more women to technology, business, and even writing, where we do women groups helping each other to break the stereotypes and current models, seeking to attain better conditions.
I have always had the impulse to seek a way to improve the conditions of everyone around us, from how we treat each other, to what happens during the professional growth of my colleagues. What started my dedication to this was a women-exclusive event I attended once, where all of these women talked about the challenges and problems they faced at work when they start to climb up in the ladder, and that’s how I started to realize many things I never questioned before, like how few female managers I’ve had, which I believed were just the way things were.
These testimonies, and seeing what other women were already doing in similar organizations and volunteer programs, as part of a greater initiative to support women, fired me up and made me want to get involved.
Some other female colleagues and I started seeing what was happening in other cities of Mexico, and started to investigate what we would do here in Morelia; we were a group of professionals seeking a way to start changing things, looking for a way to join initiatives directed at women in software.
So that next year I found the international initiative of Tehcnovation with Maria Makarovaand other women showing us what that program was about, what they did, and the things they were achieving with girls between 10 and 18 years old, and everything around that.
We brought this program to Morelia and started with some girls from residential care and private schools, and the year after that we worked with girls from an association that helps kids in underserved communities, helping them obtain an academic education from elementary school until they are ready for college.
We were surprised by the high level of engagement they showed and integrating them into these kinds of efforts is very satisfying for them, and us as mentors. You learn a lot from this labor and it’s gratifying to see kids and young women acquire new skills, especially when they see the possibilities of technology, and the communities we build for and by women.
The biggest challenge I saw was that, since this was an international program, most of the resources we used were in English, and although we do the effort to translate everything we could, some of the books and materials were still in another language, so we had to do some additional things for the girls that couldn’t understand it, or they learned to translate, using what they had at hand, like online translators and such, to learn.
Outside of that, everything else was a great collaboration, with some sponsorships from the local government, which lent us some spaces to do these workshops, and help from Universities and local companies, like Scio, BlueBox, IA Interactive, and Fundación Amamba A.C., in the form of facilities and coffee breaks for the events.
I saw a lot of collaboration and the desire to be part of a change for women, where talented people are always needed, and in most cases the resources exist to keep pushing forward these kinds of efforts, bringing lots of institutions to collaborate and be part of the change.
Back when I started, most of the interactions I had at work were with men; if the teams I collaborated with had 10 members, there would be a single woman in there at most, so I normally worked just with men. But in the last decade, I’ve been noticing a difference; I see more women in development teams, or the software industry in general, not only in departments that require soft skills but in high positions in a company that used to be solely men.
A lot of it has to do with the benefits that are starting to be offered in the industry, with spaces open for us. Now is very fortunate to have the option of working from home, and the women that are having kids now, have the chance to focus better on the very demanding task of raising children.
So, things like these had to do with necessities exclusive to women, but that has an impact in a whole context, and I see how they are starting to change. There’s a lot left to do, but benefits and offerings like that are becoming the norm in the industry.
Technovation is about inspiring and orienting young women to follow a technical career, showing them they can. That empowers them immensely, and through workshops about technology and business to create, launch and market products, essentially teaching them how to create a start-up, teaching them to be independent, and enjoy what they do.
More everyday situations are covered in talks and events targeted towards slightly older women. For example, when a woman decides to get married, for some it’s not easy to balance a marital and professional life, because this prejudice about women having to devote themselves to their homes still exists, and even more when motherhood and children are involved. These topics get touched more on the writing groups I mentioned, where the stories we write we reflect on ourselves, the world we navigate, and we confirm that most of the times we are positioned in a disadvantaged place, but we work intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to overcome these situations, creating sorority ties between us.
We are starting to shift our places in the world. If you compare past and new generations, I think we are already changing our self-perception, how we see each other, and how we accept ourselves. What’s next is bringing these changes to our workplaces, fighting for places with more favorable conditions for women, taking into account our necessities, our specific contexts, opening spaces for us to communicate and collaborate.
In the tech industry, right now there are a lot of incentives and resources being invested, and for women, it’s a place to reach economic independence, with the option to move freely and choose for yourself, which is why I want to encourage more women to try this area.
The women from Mentoralia, the association that organizes the Technovation program in all of Mexico, are starting to develop other similar workshops, and it was with them that I started to bring these efforts to Morelia. I always had their support, and that opened plenty of doors for me to meet incredible women from all over Mexico, which is incredible and it’s a good incentive for anyone looking to join as a volunteer, as it is something we are passionate about, and we build networks of female friends and colleagues that have a good time together while changing the prejudice and stereotypes linked with software, trying to bring a future where women never have to question if they have the space to join in an important professional area such as technology.
Working with a team is always a challenge, and doing it from another country is a craft. So we sat down with Jesús Magaña, one of our experienced Project Managers to talk about remote work, teaming-up, and the best parts of doing home office. Enjoy!
What does “collaboration” mean for me? Well, since school, teamwork gets a bad rep, as it mostly means dividing homework between several people. A student writes an introduction, another one does the illustrations, another puts everything together and someone prints it at the end, right?
Okay, what does a Project Manager do? I coordinate teams of people every day, so we can reach the agreed milestones of any project at every step of development until we complete it.
There are lots of issues that need to be solved during a successful development cycle, that go from personal problems to more technical issues, like faulty connections, server troubles, to limitations I try to mitigate. You know, the usual “Ah, I can’t get this thing right”, or “We are missing this thing to move on”.
It’s said that a PM manages time, budget, and scope. In reality, I manage people, which requires the usual soft skills. How do you tell a client that something has to be delayed without harming the relationship? How do you bring an issue to the team and correct it? What words do you use to give feedback?
This already has lots of nuance in a normal job environment, where certain situations are more easily approachable when you have a team physically there with you, like going to someone’s desk to check a task’s progress, knowing who is present by looking at their seats, or being available for the team when a problem arises. “Hey, I want to show you this real quick”, or “Can I get your opinion on this”.
For a Nearshore development company like Scio, with collaborators all over Latin America, these situations are different. Bonding and communication have to be considered differently, traded for some advantages that not every company has.
After all, it opens a ton of possibilities in terms of the kind of talent you can work with, be it from your city or an entirely different country. I would have second thoughts about moving elsewhere to work, and the option to join remotely allows us to meet talented people with affinities to everything relating to software, which is great for the overall talent we have at Scio.
Also, more and more clients are trusting the capabilities of Nearshore development, as this industry is particularly capable of incorporating remote models of work, and needing everyone in the same office is increasingly unnecessary.
Now, as you can imagine, I spend most of my time on calls and videoconferences. When the pandemic started and we had to move to our homes, it was somewhat uncomfortable. “Oh, they are going to see my house”, or my wife or children would pass behind me inadvertently, but you learn to deal with that.
I know being on camera can be awkward. Maybe it’s just me, but seeing myself on the screen is distracting, as I wonder how everyone else looks at me. I turn that off and try to avoid it, although watching everybody during a meeting forges a sense of teamwork.
Using these tools well is important. In the apprenticeships here at Scio, for example, new developers get training and experience, and doing it online can be difficult. They see someone explaining something on a screen, just like online classes, and there is no sense of a difference between a school setting and a professional one.
The challenge, then, is communicating Scio’s culture to everyone joining us. Is necessary to develop a sense of camaraderie, even remotely, and something that worked for us is having leisure sessions where everyone, even project leaders, can mingle and play something together. We don’t talk about work during these sessions, the point is forming a relationship beyond that, creating the bonds we need to work well together.
Collaborating is understanding that, even if we have different roles, our goals are shared, with an attitude of “Well, I finished my tasks, and it’s only Wednesday. The sprint finishes on Friday, let me see if someone needs help”.
In soccer terms, if a striker scores three goals, he has achieved something great individually. But if the team gets scored against four times and loses, that was pointless.
Collaboration is seeing yourself as part of something bigger you help to accomplish, regardless of your personal objectives.
And you have to keep in mind collaboration with clients directly, the other side of the coin in Nearshore development. Every client has a different approach to every project; sometimes they join during every scrum each week, and sometimes they have more of a “Nice job, see ya’ll in a month for the demo!” attitude.
I prefer a close client; I can create certain transparency where they can see how your team functions with an inside look into the kitchen, so to speak, to see what we are putting on the pizza they want, asking questions, and requesting some changes.
At Scio, transparency is key. Scrum helps, giving the current status of the project to everyone involved, not only the leads. “I’m working in so and so, that’s going well, but this other thing has these issues”, and that helps us to not see each other as individual pieces, but as a unit building something together.
I like the way we are working together now. The team is more productive, and although I miss the old office dynamics, remote work opens tons of connections and made a lot of changes in my personal life.
Do you want to know something cool about working from home? I have lunch with my kids every day. I used to eat out of Tupperware at the office, but now it’s a break when I can spend more time with them.
You see, when your job is transmitting the culture of Scio to everyone collaborating here, dealing with people in a professional, empathic, and understanding way from home, your kids can see it too, and are probably learning something very valuable in the process.
Developing soft skills in other people is part of my job. For example, the responsibility of the developer is to give estimates of the time a task is going to take, and for a junior dev, these estimates are more of a personal wish than realistic plans. So, as PM, I might have a better understanding of the work involved, and I need to communicate that in a respectful and empathic way.
In other words, being a Project Manager today is different. You need to create an effective working environment, make a team self-directed without someone checking every step, while forging a strong relationship with a client with enough transparency they can see results every week.
Taking my soccer analogy back, to be an effective Technical Director you have to know the game, playing matches in every position possible. I’ve been a Developer, QA, analyst, and more, and having those perspectives are crucial to understanding everyone on the team.
In-office or remotely, the point is motivating the team to give their best, solving anything that gets in the way of achieving a successful project. Is transforming teamwork from a chore into the best possible way to work.
Here at Scio, we want to dedicate this month to celebrate all the great things that make us who we are, especially the incredible talent that chose to join us this year.
So we sat and had a chat with Bryan Breit, a Test Automation Engineer from Buenos Aires, in Argentina, and asked him his story, how he jumped from Chemical Engineering to Software, how he arrived at Scio, and what insights he has about Mexico and the puzzles of process automatization. Enjoy!
“Look, I’ll start with something cultural, because I notice a significant difference in the variety of dishes Mexico has, in comparison with Argentina. There was this event where we played a game of “guess the dish”, where little squares get revealed until you can see the whole picture, and I didn’t have the slightest clue about it.
I have heard of tacos and quesadillas, of course, but it left me thinking of how could an Argentinian version work but not much occurred to me. Most of the stuff we have is more international: pizzas, barbecues, veal Milanese…
Anyway, about being a Test Automation Engineer. I initially wanted to study IT but my family persuaded me to try at least a year of Chemical Engineering. I liked and finished it, but after a couple of years without much luck in the way of a good job, I gave IT another shot.
It was at a job analyzing oil pipelines inspection data where I tried to implement macros and other automatizations for the first time, trying to make the workload a little less tedious, because it was a very repetitive task, but required certain criteria not easy at all to automate.
But after a while, I got tired of that and was already studying Programming, when a friend in IT asked me why I didn’t try Quality Assurance, where I could start right away.
I applied to some postings and got a call from a large, global consulting company, where I learned some automatization stuff that I found interesting, even if it lacked the programming side I was looking for. In any case, I decided to dedicate myself to that, a sort of hybrid between both fields.
Now, at the beginning of the pandemic, I had been trying to freelance and started to get some job offers that could help me with that.
The first couple of interviews I had were exhausting because they required some long, in-person live tests, and in the end, I couldn’t even get the job. But I kept trying, and the third or fourth time was at Scio, which wasn’t as exhausting as the others because their tests weren’t live.
A live test gets you nervous, and you have to know everything by memory alone. I generally don’t work that way: you remember the things you use every day, sure, but there’s stuff you hardly ever use. So if I get stuck, I like to check Google and find an answer that will, at least, point me in the right direction.
Then, when I find how someone else solved the issue, I adapt it (because no Internet answer is going to work as is) and test it. In the end, it is more about the creativity you use to solve any problem than memorization, I think.
The Scio test was about a framework I hadn’t used before, so I had the time to research and implement it for the first time.
These days, I’m adapting to a new schedule [the end of Daylights Saving Time] in Mexico and I can’t say I do the same things every day. Some of my tickets are about designing an automatization test and submitting it for approval, checking other engineers’ code to make sure everything is clean, or sending my own to review before I merge it with other already completed stuff.
If errors happen (because maintenance is needed or something failed in the app), I have to report and research them, and that can get interesting.
It’s rewarding when I find a way to make the automatization work, helping the Devs find the source of the issue, or when I can improve the stability of the application by removing bugs and errors.
Keep in mind, this is the first time I’ve been able to do what I want. At past jobs, it was more about manual QA and maybe, if there was time left, some automatization.
Here at Scio is the first time I’ve been doing automatization 100% of the time, and I feel that I was well received here, cultural differences aside. I don’t have a lot of interaction with my Mexican coworkers, but when I do need to chat with my team at Scio it’s good I can do it in Spanish most of the time.
By the way, I’m also practicing my English a lot more, because, at my previous company, I was more involved with the Colombian sub-team than the American one. There, the work was more divided by groups, but here I feel more involved with the team at Mexico and Scio as a whole.
For 2022 though, I would like to find more balance in my life. I just can’t adapt to the pandemic; I go out being careful to wear my mask properly, keep distances and everything, but I would like a better balance to travel more, even work from somewhere else, although I know I’ll need a good Internet connection for that.
As a final comment, to anyone interested in Test Automation, I’d say “always look for something to improve in the process”. In QA, there’s always something that you can make better, but let’s go a little further: think how you can cover the entire process and make it more coherent, encompassing as many cases as possible without repeating them because there’s always something you can make faster, more stable and more trustworthy.
It’s always interesting to think about continuous improvement. You probably are not going to be able to make every Sprint better, but every few months something good should come along.
Then you can say with all confidence: “I made this better”.
