OSDev.org

Just curious about the profile of forum users.

What's your occupation and/or education?

I'm an B.Sc. in Computer Science, working as System Architect and Researcher (speech synthesis).

I am student in 10th grade.

For a while I built tents and another job cleaned toilets.

My occupation is that of serial entrepreneur. Currently I work on the internals of a graph database engine in my startup, mostly programming in C++11 but also some OCaml and Common Lisp.

My educational background is that of an autodidact. Dropped out of elementary school to work as a programmer, later dropped in on interesting bits of high school and university. Taught myself computer science from MIT's materials. Currently finishing up a physics degree at the Open University and starting on another bachelor's in history (classical antiquity).

I began OS development at the wee age of 13, with Richard Burgess's classic book "Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating System". Thus began a long journey that I can't say has reached any particular conclusion, but has certainly been rewarding and educational nonetheless.

Software engineer. I have been doing mostly embedded/system/low-level stuff in C/C++ and asm in the past 15+ years.

M. Sc. in Energy Technology working on technical drawings, 3D modeling, etc.

First year system and network administration student, working on my CCNA at the moment.

I have about 2 years of college/university studying computer science.

I have worked for the past 15 years as a CNC Administrator and developer on Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (E1). I work mostly with IBM i platform installations of E1. I now work as a private consultant.

I've been working as a web developer for the last 15 years or so using C# and Java. Before that, I was mainly working with Visual Basic, QBasic, BasicA, Commodore 64 Basic, Spectrum Basic and Commodore CPM Basic.

In my spare time, in addition to OS development, I also do some indie game development, play a little bass and drums, and at one point, was lightly into drag racing street cars.

I've done engineering in Computer Science and now working in a Bank's IT dept, boring job though.
From last 1 year I'm into OS development and now looking for a job which involves low-level stuff, don't think its going to happen any soon.

I have a BA in Mathematics.

I'm a dog walker.

I'm a software developer, started before I was a teenager, now I've finished school, 3 university degrees, working full time for nearly 3 years at a huge multinational corporation.

I work with C#, Java, a lot of Perl and PL/SQL (particularly on servers), and a growing amount of Javascript (as we experiment with Node.js). I'm on a shared team that supports more than a dozen applications and accounts (we work on changes, bug fixes, research questions, etc. via tickets), although occasionally I'll be dedicated to an implementation, which are really formal with project managers, architects, testers, client QA.

i worked last ten years as a BIOS engineer. Mostly debugging, rarely write new software. ~4 years of BIOS developers and ~5 as a software quality engineer. These days, I am putting all my energy into python based automation. It is still low level testing stuff but all is happening over the SSH terminal. http://www.wsu.edu graduate in BSEE '06.

Since I look at both angles, software development tends to be highly specializing in certain areas and narrow scope and QA tends to gain more broader knowledge and of course less knowledge in certain functional areas. I liked doing both. QA tends to be more authoritative position. Especially when you have a dev experience and file a defect that is more insightful than B.S bugs which help developers a lot.

Also wanna study sort of AI and fintech in the future in a touch base, just as an interest. Also wanna finish my kernel project in few years time.

ggodw000 wrote:Since I look at both angles, software development tends to be highly specializing in certain areas and narrow scope and QA tends to gain more broader knowledge and of course less knowledge in certain functional areas. I liked doing both. QA tends to be more authoritative position. Especially when you have a dev experience and file a defect that is more insightful than B.S bugs which help developers a lot.

In many places there exist an unhealthy tension between dev and test/QA (precisely because test/QA is technically inferior (by design, i.e. by hiring and paying) and is looked down upon by dev) and if you happen to be in the latter group, you may need to prove you're equal (or at least not an "idiot"), if possible. If not, move to dev or a different company.

alexfru wrote:

ggodw000 wrote:Since I look at both angles, software development tends to be highly specializing in certain areas and narrow scope and QA tends to gain more broader knowledge and of course less knowledge in certain functional areas. I liked doing both. QA tends to be more authoritative position. Especially when you have a dev experience and file a defect that is more insightful than B.S bugs which help developers a lot.

In many places there exist an unhealthy tension between dev and test/QA (precisely because test/QA is technically inferior (by design, i.e. by hiring and paying) and is looked down upon by dev) and if you happen to be in the latter group, you may need to prove you're equal (or at least not an "idiot"), if possible. If not, move to dev or a different company.

yes i noticed it. in fact when i was developer i did find qa-s are in generally inferior in technical knowledge and it is just the way it is. I have proven several dev-s that i am constantly in touch that i am worthy, as even as a qa, i always deal with software bug from dev perspective by always asking how it will help developers to solve easily. Also out of several dozen dev-s i work with all the time lot of them are real cheap and corner cutters, and i catch the cheap work on a dime. So it can go both way. Most devs who look down on qa is normally junior or some kinda issue with them, best engineers actually take adv. of qa in their best interest. But there are also tons of shitty qa-s who has no idea what they are doing. so it is mostly on individual rather than who is qa or dev.
Saying that (my situation and title) does not mean it help for generic opinoin that qa-s are less knowledgeable and indeed it is generally so. and that is kinda ongoing concern with me. It is sometimes felt when i met a hordes of developers that i never worked with. or if i apply for a new job it can also backfire. So it is kinda problematic although it is not acute. i I am considering the possibility of going back to dev, but working in narrow scope also will be disappointment. So I am kinda waiting to see what will interest more down the road.