Interview: Eric Proegler

- All right, folks. So we've talked a lot about careers in this course and I want to make sure that we're bringing in real life experience. And so I've invited a dear friend and cohort to the conversation to talk a little bit about the direction that your career can take. And so I've invited Eric Proegler along who is a staff level infrastructure engineer, quality engineer. And he'll be joining us to talk through a little bit of his career with us. Eric, thank you for joining us. - Oh, it's so great to talk to you, Ash. What's going on? - You know, just good stuff in testing is going on, and happy to have you because you're one of those great things. One of the things that we talked about at length in this course is how your career can take you into an area of specialty. And so I know just from working with you, as well as seeing your work at conferences and on workshops and things of that sort, that you have a lot to do with performance and load testing. Can you you help us understand a little bit of how you got there? - Sure. So when I talk to other performance load testers their experiences tend to be something like mine where it shows up as a nonfunctional requirement for the software we're testing. Nobody there has any expertise. And then whoever's perceived to be the most technical is sent off to learn how to do load testing. So I got shipped off to a course in Dallas. I went there for a week and learned some basics, did some reading, did some research, had a tool placed in my hands. And I guess that's how I got started, pretty much kind of on an island by myself. And I learned that there was a community out there of people who were working in that specialty, and I was able to follow them and correspond with them and eventually meet them. My connection was the person whose course I had taken in Dallas. And that introduced me to a larger community. That's how I got connected with people who were writing and speaking about what the state of the art was. That was very helpful to me. Then suddenly I had mentors. I had people I could work with, even though I'd had to look outside of my immediate circle and the people I saw day to day. It was actually not that hard to find people who were really good at this. And if you ask some interesting questions they're usually willing to answer. So I was able to get the nurturing and support I needed to grow. - That's incredible. And as you mentioned, this sounds like a lot of testers' experience. I know from my personal experience it took me reaching out to folks and gaining community to learn more and to grow as a tester. When you first originally were given this assignment, was it something you were excited about? - Well, I was excited about it. It sounded like a chance to learn some new skills. And then the work itself is pretty interesting to me. It's very dry, but it's something fun to think about and to spend time on, and reason about, and learn about. It has a lot to do with systems and resources and how systems interact. In some ways, it's a super technical testing experience that is peripherally related to test automation, but was more about really understanding the systems I was working with. I think that's what I enjoyed about it is I started looking at interactions between components and thinking more like an architect and I that's where it really pulled me into it. - That's awesome. And what I also enjoy is the fact that your business saw value in it and they sent you out to grow and learn on this. And you've now made it such an imperative part of your career. What other skills or tangible items within your software experience have given you the skills to move through the career that you've had and really stand out as being the items that you would recommend to new or growing testers? - So I really dislike hustle culture and this idea that this is all about passion and I need to spend, you know, 15 hours a day, practicing and consuming things. I don't think you learn that way. I think your mind can handle a certain influx rate but I do suggest looking outside of your immediate circle and reading what people say, and lurking in places where people are talking about things like Twitter, which is not great for performance engineering for the most part. Finding ways to soak up background knowledge, and even if it's things that you don't understand when you're first hearing about them, that does build up over time. You start to make connections. Give your mind some time to work on it. You'll put together more and more. The other thing I'd recommend is being very deliberate about spending time at work, on getting better at your job. Self-improvement is not something that happens in the margins. It's not something you can do when you feel like you have spare time, or on your weekends and nights. Your boss wants you to get better at your job and to become more effective. You might not always explicitly discuss what time you're spending on what, but trust me, you're doing the right thing. I mean, all other professions have this pretty constant expectation that you're going to be learning and doing continuing education and figuring out how to get better at what you're doing. And I don't think our field is any different. I think you have to focus yourself on study and figure out how to do things. Bite-size chunks from like a Coursera on how to do a particular kind of test framework. I mean, okay, that's fine. But I've also found a lot of value in understanding why as opposed to just how, and understanding the business value of the things that you're doing. You can learn about that too. I mean, some of that's experience, but some of that is understanding why do I performance test? Let me think through what the risks are of going live. What happens when things go wrong? What does that look like? And that helps me talk about my work. It helps me understand my work, and it helps me with my stakeholders understand what it is that they need from me. - Amazing. One last thing that I want to cover. In your bio you talked a little bit about your career either being linear or how you're transitioning through the different roles that you've held. Do you have any words for folks who are in the midst of their career and are having either a push or a pull and are desirous to do more in some area or other, and are really just at a point where there are some decisions that they need to make? - My real talk about testing is that it's a very interesting field. There there's demand for it. It pays well, but it can feel that you're it can feel like you're a junior partner in some of the teams that you're in, and that does wear on you after a while. It can be tiring to not get invited to that meeting or to not be included in a decision when you're as much a part of the team as anyone else. The times when that's really gotten to me and opportunities have come up to try something else I've done it. I've left testing twice and come back. The first time was to work as a sales engineer, which was around when I was moving. So I was helping some system I'd been testing for a number of years. I took a job installing and configuring systems like that. That was for less than a year. I found that pretty interesting, actually. That talking to customers, seeing real use cases that changed how I thought about testing. It very much impacted how I approach testing these days in terms of being able to test it from the perspective of people, of an end user. And for the kind of software that we had that tended to be a line worker who was just trying to get their job done. And the software was, it was a burden. I went back to testing for a while after that. And then I tried another I took another little detour into product ownership, and I worked for a company that did cloud-based load testing. And I owned a product for a while. Again, that gave me additional perspective about my work testing that I wouldn't have gotten if I had stayed testing. I found those experiences very enriching. They made me much better at my job. I don't think I could be a staff test engineer without understanding the why as much as the how. And those experiences are where I really learned about the why. Thought that was really important. I've also gone into management and back out again. I think that kind of variation and experience helps with the same sort of thing. It gives your work more context. So yeah, I guess the advice is if you're in the middle of your career and you have to make some decisions, try something out. What's the worst that can happen? You don't like it. Okay, then you get another job. You probably will learn something. Something new can be invigorating. You can figure out what you miss. Maybe you'll like the new thing. And I have not found that careful planning of my career has helped very much. I have found that putting in the reps, doing the work, and being ready when opportunities arise has been the way that I found my way through my career, including trying some things or accepting assignments that at first I was not sure were right for me. I've almost always, not always, almost always, been rewarded with an open mind to trying something different, and trying something that stretches me. - Amazing. Well, Eric, are there any last words that you would want to leave our learners today? - Yeah, testing is the best. It's so fun to think about a complicated issue and try out models and understand things in ways that other people don't, to get to pick apart things and criticize them. 'Cause I'm petty like that. Getting a chance to really pop up from the forest view down to the tree view and examine things and find problems, I think it's the coolest work. That's why I've kept coming back to it. I think I'm going to try to stick with it from here on out, but who knows what's going to happen tomorrow? - I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate your time and thank you. - Take care, Ash.