Wednesday June 08, 2005 Weblog
Wednesday June 08, 2005 The beatings will continue until the blogging improves
Well, it's come to this. Blogging is all the rage at Sun right now and there's a lot of pressure to blog. I've held out up until now, but have decided to give in to the peer and management pressure. The fact that I'm choosing to start blogging right before APR (annual performance review) time is of course purely coincidental. :-) I do get to count this as an accomplishment, right?
Presumably an introduction is in order, on the off chance that somebody actually ends up reading this...
I've been with Sun as a test/QA engineer for nearly a decade now. I started out in the Computer Systems division qualifying SCSI HBAs. With the creation of Network Storage my group got sucked into the new division, but I soon returned to Computer Systems as a lead in the software QA group for desktops. After a while I moved to the Solaris division to work on Solaris Volume Manager and I've been there for the past six years.
I expect most of my ramblings will be with regards to test engineering at Sun, how we try to help ship quality products in the extremely short time frames that this industry forces upon you, and general observations on my experiences at Sun compared to other places I've worked. Hopefully I'll spare you tales of my family life, my poor taste in movies and music, etc. However, as long as the pressure to blog continues, I make no guarantees as to the type of content I'll post. Gotta be ready with everything and anything in case they impose some sort of word count quota.
Getting involved with blogging at Sun is kind of strange. You hear tons about it, there's a lot of interest in having employees do it, and there's both overt and subtle suggestions to get a blog going. However, when you do sign up for a blogging account, you're presented with a bunch of warnings. Basically, you're given all sorts of reasons why screwing up could cost Sun money and possibly cost you your job and you're asked, "Are you sure you want to do this?" The corporate culture seems to be heading towards "Blog or die!" while the legalese is suggesting "Blog and die!"
Seems like a good time to go read Catch-22...