Enablers
About more than 3 years ago, a colleague of mine joined my team as a QA team member. Back then I was a Product owner. (BTW, I’m still a PO, we grow old being POs and God knows what’s the next step if you love owning products 😄).
When this guy joined us he was responsible for manual testing. Gets the phone, the app on it, creates test cases, applies the test cases manually, and then report issues. Pretty simple, and sometimes boring, daily tasks.
I talked to him, knew that he had finished his graduation project the year before using python. It was about processing text files to do something that I don’t fully remember, but the project itself doesn’t matter that much now.
Around that time we had a problem with the strings in the project, we needed to have them collected from the strings files, translated for iOS and Android (by non developers), and then applied to the project by developers. The process around it was cumbersome, manual work, mistakes, and we had no budget to buy a tool for this (which was another stupid problem).
After talking to him about his graduation project and that he’s bored these days, I asked him if he has some time to help with automating part of this string translation process. The idea itself was simple, yet we needed it.
Not long time later the guy showed me a demo on the use of the script he wrote, and we used it for translations for a while. Afterwards he talked to his manager that he is interested in learning automation testing, and she agreed with him a plan for that to happen within the day job.
He used to tell me that I’m the second most important person in the company (as a joke 😄) as his most important person in the company back then was a senior automation testing engineer. This also tells about his passion towards this thing.
This guy works now as an engineer, building automation testing frameworks, with a decent amount of open source contribution. And about 2 years of experience doing it. I’m in a different company, he’s in a different company, yet I’m proud every time I see his achievements.
The point of this blog post is:
Big part of our job is to spot passion in people, enable them to work on it and help them to employ it for the good of the company. We should be enablers, as his manager, seeking that they benefit the company while loving what they do.
As much as I love working with passionate people, I hate working with passion-less people who work just for the $. And as much as I love the attitude of enablers, I hate the attitude of disablers. Disablers are people blocking better results from being achieved, either due to lack of passion, insecurities, or just political bullshit.
As much as we can, let’s be enablers, helping good people become better and helping good ideas survive the bullshit. It makes our impact go beyond the job, the product, and the company.
