Saturday, April 12, 2008

Digging Through The Prosper.com Help Wanted Section

Prosper does list jobs on their website, but it's PR washed and very blah. The recruiters seem to have more fun when they post Craigslist listings, and they leave some interesting crumbs in their wake.

For example, Prosper's looking for a new Product Manager because marketing is taking over the website look and feel (which begs the question - who has it now?):

The content of every single public facing page on our web site (http://www.prosper.com) is about to belong to the marketing team. As a product manager, you will be directly responsible for planning, designing, and releasing our site’s new features. Driving strategy, working with business owners, and writing PRDs. Make a difference on day one.

This means I need to pester their marketing folks about the new performance search page. I'll be happy to fill out a survey, if necessary.

Their quest for another software quality assurance (SQA) engineer also hints on why some features take a while to roll out - their user interface QA is done overseas (assuming that they don't have a cruise ship parked 15 miles off the coast of CA):

We need an SQA Engineer who is self starter (no hand holding here!), understands database structures, and knows web app testing pretty darn well. You’ll be spend a lot of time doing gray box testing, digging through database tables, testing APIs, and automating tests for web apps. This is NOT a functional UI testing position (most of the functional black box testing is done by our offshore team).

This is not to dismiss the capabilities of offshore engineering (I've met some pretty sharp folks in Asia), but a 12 hr time difference does tend to slow down communication.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

if done right a 12 hour time difference is perfect for functional testing...
Engineers build it. Qa test it report bug. Engineers fix it. Qa verify...
Instead of 4 days it is now 2...

But I agree communication is the key.

Anonymous said...

A big if you got there...