Noa Tamir (Data Science Manager) and Raz Shuty (Engineering Manager) share with Alaa Sarhan (IC Fullstack-er) what management is about in general and why an IC (Individual Contributor) is nowadays more than ever empowered to not become a manager for the wrong reasons.

Sneak-peak reasons from the episode:

• Manager role is totally different from a lead IC role
• ICs are paid more than managers
• Missing short reward cycles, a.k.a "It's not about you anymore"
• and more in our lovely conversation ;)

Recommended reads on the topic:

• Charity Majors' 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager
• Tanya Reilly's Not all engineering leaders are engineering managers

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan speak with Rony Lahav about the role of QA and Automation, Why do we need QA people (or why developers shouldn’t be the only testers), Different Test - Component, Integration, System, E2E, Is Manual QA dead?

We also touched on:

• Automation is a software project
• when should testing/QA stop? / what kind of bugs/edges cases are fine to be ignored or not covered?
• QA vs. Product Acceptance. How much do they conflict, and do they complement each other?
• what areas QA covers on top of "functional": performance, accessibility, usability, fault tolerance/recoverability, etc.
• In presence of QA team/role, what should Software Engineers test?
• Tracking data quality: tracking QA, and Functional QA (OSS tool from King https://github.com/king/tratt-api)
• Phases of QA: development, build, release, on-call
• What QA and TE gets that devs, PMs, and DS don’t get and what do we get when there are better collaboration and comms
• Team testing

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan speak with Alexandra Paun (@ale_paun) about the Functional Manager hat that she often wears as part of her current job at King.

We learn from Alexandra the many intersections this role has with many, if not all functions and departments in the organization, even extending outside of it to negotiate, collaborate and continuously work with external partners and organization, to bring a great business initiative from conception to life.

In this episode we talk about the skill set of a functional manager, the phases a project goes through under their supervision and the challenges and rewarding aspects of this role.

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License