viredfox

Assuming that pushing to gain skills is the highest priority. Since I have while a bit of autonomy in the current startup (comparing to working in other company), would it be possible to improve my skills while simultaneously trying to changing things in the company (since I'd get to do more things)? Or would that be a futile effort?

None of the cloud CI would work for us: we have an inhouse hosted git server (the CTO does not trust open source, in general). So to do automated testing, I'd have to set up a Jenkins server on my own.

I'm from nowhereville college, and the pay is lower than the low end you gave.

Part of the reason I asked on HN is because I don't know if feeling awesome is the norm in a startup: the work is expected to be stressful, isn't it?

Normally we have a scope of what we want to do (ie. Let's redo the homepage and the login page). Then the product team group up and hash out the requirement, which is then sent to the developer. Although there are iterative changes in design, I actually don't know why the changes were made most of the time (they are not because of the implemented demo by the dev, the product team only starts seeing at the same time of QA)

Thanks everyone for the advice. I have another question: assuming that pushing to gain skills is the highest priority. Since I have while a bit of autonomy in the current startup (comparing to working in other company), would it be possible to improve my skills while simultaneously trying to changing things in the company (since I'd get to do more things)? Or would that be a futile effort?

Part of the problem is that I'm not THAT good. I believe that there are a lot of things that can be fixed and/ or done better. And I'm fairly certain there are certain programmers that could do that, unfortunately, I'm yet to be a programmer of that capability. I can't keep up with both the expected work and trying to setup CI (to the extent that would demonstrate its usefulness)

Selenium needs quite a bit more overhead than the unit test I'd be doing, so I think it's even less unlikely.

He is certainly not ideology against tests by any means, it's just he doesn't believe the trade off would be worth it (test writing time and debug vs time spend directly on development). My guess the answer would be along the line of "we're lacking resources"

The CTO is a developer, with ~ 17 years of experience, I believe. Although I don't think he wrote any substantial amount of code at all in our product (from the start).

We're an end-user consumer site, and the rate has been stable in term of absolute number (so decreasing in %).

I called the process waterfall because it's a strict requirement - implementation - QA. I'm not particularly concerned with the tech stack, that was just a personal gripe rather than anything.

To be fair, I think it's more of a concern that trying to write tests would slow the actual work down - I was trying to write regression test (still unit test, but definitely not tdd).

I don't think anyone in our team is anxious to be right. However, I also don't think anyone in our team is anxious to get better too (both in term of personal skills AND our process in general). For several reasons, most of our developers treat (and work) this as a 9 to 5 jobs.

I actually talked with the CTO (not directly related to that), but I believe he doesn't think unit test is a worthwhile investment at the time. From what I learned, I don't think he has ever worked in an environment with a strong culture for automated testing + CI.