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Do You Know Enough or Are You Good Enough To Be a RoadTester?

rscasny

This question in my title has been in the back of my mind all year long and I have been somewhat slow to answer it. Oh, I could make excuses...not enough time, Covid-19 lockdown, and so on. But it has weighed on me for while. And this week, I want to take the time on this Friday afternoon to answer it.

 

(Drum roll....)

 

The answer is YES!

 

While the answer is rather short, the background to the question perhaps requires more explanation.

 

I think it was late last year (2019) when I had a roadtester return a product  because he said he could not do it justice given his level of knowledge. I appreciated his honesty. I consider him a quality, professional individual. But I had wished he had given me a chance to talk with him about it. I would have probed him about what he felt he needed to know to review the product. How could I help him gain that knowledge? If I had gotten him a mentor, would he have agreed to continue the roadtest?

 

But this experience made me reflect on who makes a good roadtester and what a roadtester needs to know. Obviously, we roadtest not only elementary products (educational/maker)  but very complex products (FPGA dev boards or test equipment). Some knowledge of course is necessary. However, one does not need to be a genius to be a roadtester. A roadtest is a lot of things to different people. For some people it's a project. For other people it is a fancy unboxing. And for even other people it is a teardown-like exercise that digs deeply into the product. Each of these roadtest paradigms requires different levels of knowledge. A detailed application goes a long way in telling me what paradigm you are shooting for. But for me, I think there is room for every one of these testing styles.

 

I don't expect everyone to know everything about a product such that he/she never needs to ask for help. element14 does have the luck in possessing some members who are very bright, talented, and highly experienced. But my sense is that they worked at developing their expertise over a number of years. For me a good roadtester does not necessarily have to be an expert, but he/she knows when to ask for help. I think this is an area where a new roadtester needs to work on: don't be afraid to ask for help. You can do it by making a comment on the roadtest page. Engineering is rarely a isolated experience. Sure, there is the Einstein who changes the world all by himself. But for the most part, I believe engineering is a collaborative experience.

 

Someone (may have been Shakespeare or some famous Greek like Socarates) said Know Thyself. Learn to know and trust yourself and what you can handle. If you only feel comfortable right now with a Raspberry Pi, that's fine. Apply to those roadtests and strive to be the best Pi roadtester there is! As you learn, you will likely apply and be selected for more complex roadtests.

 

Good roadtesters have not only technical skills, but also have other skills that I am mindful of when I select applicants as official roadtesters or that I bring to the sponsor's attention when we meet to discuss applicants. Good roadtests participate in the community. Good roadtesters have a consistent track record. I watch for people who have a passion or great interest in what they do. I learn it from their application. These kinds of people help me and help our sponsors. Just this week I had a roadtester tell me something was not wired correctly on the kit that was shipped to him. I told the sponsor. Well, he was correct and the sponsor is working on correcting it. No roadtest or roadtester is perfect. But the perfect roadtester is someone who takes what he knows and uses his/her knowledge to the best of his/her ability.

 

I have a number of roadtests running this month. I encourage you to apply for one that interests you.

 

Randall Scasny

RoadTest Program Manager

  • Great commentary RS.

     

    I have come to appreciate that RoadTest Reviews are a venture into the unknown. You are going to what may be a familiar place or some place where you have never been. Both contain unknowns. 

     

    I see a RoadTest review advertisement as the bait that causes me to look at the product picture and read the accompanying datasheet. This triggers the thought, what I could do with that. I may leave the post thinking I haven't the knowledge nor the willingness to take on the review or I can do this. The walk-away time always reaped benefits. It has caused me to abandon a review application or submit an application for a review I wasn't considering.

     

    Whether my application is successful or not I read most reviews. Reviews I have submitted an application for I especially read. I compare and evaluate. I also like to read about struggles. Yeah, the I can't get it to work cries! Bog posts outlining what has been done without finding an answers are especially interesting. I ask myself, can I help or what would I do? I try to be gentle in my response. I empathise with the person who made the post. I realise when I have reached the point of asking for help, my confidence is low and my frustration is high. Not a good formula for success so try not to contribute to either.

     

    I am unable to apply the label of easy to completing a RoadTest Review. Even if the technology is in my wheel house of knowledge. In my opinion, an application to take up a RoadTest Review is recognizing you are willingly submitting yourself to a challenge.

     

    What do you do, when you have no idea what to do? I am getting ready to post a RoadTest Review that I have been working on for a few weeks, with a high school student. The opening question to this paragraph I posed to him during our final post project review. As RS has suggested in his commentary, after you have exhausted your own bag of tricks to find a solution to a problem, asking for assistance, when you have no idea what to do, is one thing you can do.

  •   Thank you for asking the question.  I struggled with this mightily before throwing my hat in the ring the first time.  I had read reviews by and .  Whoa!  Them is some smart fellas.  I read some less than kind responses to some real newbies that had been selected for road tests.  Not many, but they're out there.  So why roll the dice on applying for a road test?  Some stuff, I'm pretty good at.  Maybe I have a crazy enough application or test idea that stands out from the crowd.  And sometimes, you don't need Sheldon Cooper or Leonard Hofstadter.  Sometimes you need Howard Wolowitz. <- Big Bang Theory reference.

     

    Like above, I'm interested in the struggles.  Community members have helped me in my projects (Thank you!).  I want to be helpful also.  To me, this validates the desire/requirement for Community involvement before being selected as a road tester.  We have to be willing to reach out.  I didn't reach out during the Avnet Azure Sphere Sensing the World challenge - and my project failed.  Wow was that humbling.  It was also self inflicted.  You don't have to go it alone.

     

    Randall hit the nail on the head with "passion".  If there is a road test that feeds your passion, apply for it.  If you're passionate about it, you have some knowledge of the subject and what direction you need to go.  Your passion will give you the drive to continue and to reach out when you hit road blocks.  I'll also share that even if you're busy, you'll figure out how to get it done if you're passionate about it.  Life's funny that way.  We somehow find time for the things that inspire us.

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    I wholly concur with your statements on ‘passion’ and finding the way.  It always induces a never-say-die mentality in people which is why the best leaders/delivers induce that passion in others to bring the best out in them.

     

    Concomitantly, I also think its worth applying for RoadTests that seem to be getting little traction where you have the skills to do it but you might not necessarily be that interested.  It must help with keeping the roadtest programme viable and diverse and supported by manufacturers/industry.

  • Recently I actually created a question here in the community regarding the Enrollment forms.. One of the (dropdown) questions is like 'what is your expertise in the product?' and the options are 'Beginner, Very Experienced and something beyond that I think (Don't know from heart, and too busy to look it up.) And I honstly think this is a hard question, using these answers. Frequently I enroll for tests, that contain a variation of factors. Yes, I consider myself a capable software engineer, yes, I'm pretty darn dangerous with a soldering iron. But have no experience with one or two of the protocols / chips / techniques mentioned on this item.

     

    Does that make me very experienced? Or a beginner? ^_^'

     

    I have the self-deprecating sense of humor to, for example share an experience I had with the MKR WAN (Thanks again for selecting me for that roadtest, by the way) where I very nearly bricked the controller with some stupid Arduino-level programming error. I dug myself out of that hole though, and hope very much others have a use for my short log of that experience. (Maybe I should post it as a blog post on the community... )

     

    That said, I think there should Not be a taboo on the community to ask for help / insights / ideas for a roadtest, if you realise that at somepoint you're in over your head. Heck, mention the members / team / people in your Review if they like. Frankly, isn't this what the community is about in the first place?

  • in reply to daemoninformatica

      wrote:

     

    ...

     

    I think there should Not be a taboo on the community to ask for help / insights / ideas for a roadtest, if you realise that at somepoint you're in over your head. Heck, mention the members / team / people in your Review if they like. Frankly, isn't this what the community is about in the first place?

    Yes. When you struggle, post it. You may get help. And it's part of the road test testimonial.

     

    When I'm selected for a road test, I also like to set up a temporary Slack channel with the fellow testers. For quick questions, e.g.: what version of the libraries do you use, did you find an example for xxxx, I think that something is not working for me can you please try...

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    A group / channel between roadtesters for an item. Now there's an idea..

     

    I'd wager that would even help against procrastination issues. ^_^ (See also my psot on the 'Do you have enough time for a Roadtest' discussion.)

     

    I'd like to try that in the future, if fellow roadtesters would be up for that.

  • in reply to daemoninformatica

    Your share struck a cord with me.

     

    I have difficultly answering questions that gauge my knowledge and experience level. My spouse would suggest I always undervalue my worth. To answer such a question I usually make a comparison between myself and others. The others in the comparison many times, are the really talented 10's that share on this site. I read their posts and think, "How the sh&! would I know that." or "I'm to old to gain a foundation in FPGA to even attempt an evaluation of that product."

     

    I would encourage you to share your Arduino blunder. I have no doubt others have made the same error. My go to story is shutdown -h vs shutdown -r. One halt a *inx server and one reboots it the server. At 2 in the am, post a maintenance window, issue the wrong command and its a trip to the office to push a button. I tell that story to junior admins all the time.

     

    The failure road signs people share, enable me to keep my head in the game when I'm working with the technology by trying to recognize them.

  • in reply to colporteur

      wrote:

    My go to story is shutdown -h vs shutdown -r. One halt a *inx server and one reboots it the server. At 2 in the am, post a maintenance window, issue the wrong command and its a trip to the office to push a button.

    It's been a long time since I've seen a server without some sort of remote power management - e.g. HP's iLO or Dell's iDRAC for instance. I agree with your general point though.

  • in reply to Fred27

    I worked for a national telecommunication provider. Some of the computer systems were over 30 years in existence. No vendor support, the vendor was long gone and no hardware support other than ebay.

     

    Technology is deceiving. If it is making money and costing little to maintain then companies like telco's will rarely change it. My skills in Vax and more current operating systems kept me in a careers that spanned generations of technology. I lead a team to implement a digital television systems because I knew all the legacy systems it would have to interface with. Learn the new and work to intergrate with the old. Rarely did I have access to the fancy systems for making maintenance easier.

     

    I recall dragging one vendor kicking and screaming to replace telnet with ssh. I succeeded in my quest by offering to do a presentation at one of their customer conferences. Six months later the vendor announced this wonderful new technology they were going to support call ssh.