Note: This is a text about the project work at one of my previous employments.
Introduction
These days everybody talks about Agile, Automation, DevOps and Continous (whatever), without truly understanding why things have gone in this direction. After all, for many years, a software project had a couple of well-known steps that needed to be followed, like:
Full, thorough planning at the very beginning and from time to time, before significant milestones;
Development, lots of development behind closed doors;
Lots of manual QA work, little automation with some custom-written testing framework written from scratch by one of the developers;
Infrequent releases (e.g. every year or even every other year or so); releases were thoroughly prepared and tested, with code freezes for (sometimes) months before the Day.
Even if everybody knows these days that such approach may have been a bad way of doing things, it actually worked for many years because that was the way the world expected things to work. There were many constraints, e.g:
Note: you can find my comments here for the similar event held in 2015.
Another year, another AWS event; for this year they have changed the venue and brought in more speakers, unfortunately of inferior quality compared to Sebastien Stormacq, the sole speaker from 2015. This year twice as many people registered, roughly 500 people queuing up for the early morning registration.
The main difference from the last year was the presentation content being split into 2 tracks, the “technical” and the “business” rooms, each with their own focus. On the technical side the following topics were covered:
So – you got yourself an interview with Googamazbook and you are set on failing it. Or maybe you’re not set but you’re simply not trusting the 99.9+% failure rate that is typical for these companies and you want to be in some sort of control over you failing the interview. Either way, you got to the right place!
1st stage failing
Well, the 1st stage is the screening by the recruiter. This is actually pretty hard to fail if you are conditioned from school, like many of us, to always give the (expected) correct answers. Some people are failing at this stage due to not “speaking the same language” as the current employees of the company, but they are a minority.
So if:
you’re set on failing the recruiter screening;
you got yourself a lot of experience;
you were pretty good with quizzes during the school years:
… it’s basically impossible to fail on this one. Sure, you can make up wrong answers, but that’s just lame. Let’s simply forget about it and go to the next stage.