New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to sell myself to a company downplaying my holes in experience? Ask HN: How to sell myself to a company downplaying my holes in experience?

Ask HN: How to sell myself to a company downplaying my holes in experience?
4 by ccajas | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I'm going to lead with a particular example. Everyone probably understand the value of code testing, though I haven't seen it in my personal experience, to see fellow developers at work writing their own tests. I've been with five companies and they all follow a QA-focused process. What we typically do is mark an issue on our project tracker (Redbooth, for example) as something like "send to QA", wait for the lead developer to push to the staging server, which can take a while because the lead dev is usually outsourced and living in a very different time zone. When he finally pushes the code, QA is able to test the new code to see if the issues have been fixed. As the developer I'm not expected to write my own tests there. I don't know what regression means (is that like linear regression?) and wouldn't know which testing framework to use. However, more and more, I have been interviewing with companies that prefer automated testing and developers writing their own tests. They might ask me what my experience with unit testing is, my mind draws a blank and simply say I have no experience with it. I'm sure that's a turn-off for them and now probably see me as a rogue who plays by his own rules, wreaking a tornado of havoc onto well-structured code. Anyways, I want don't want things like a lack of automated testing experience to be an "anti-selling point" anymore. But the companies I worked at didn't have a business case justifying why they should spend expensive developer resources that detracts from something that just works already. "I don't know X but I will have no problem learning it!!" is also not the saving grace at an interview like some people think it does. There has been no instance of me saying I can pick up new knowledge quickly in an interview in which the company gave me an offer. It's getting to the point where now I have to sell businesses cases to remain employable for other companies. Anyone help me out with this, starting with this particular example with TDD?

I'm going to lead with a particular example. Everyone probably understand the value of code testing, though I haven't seen it in my personal experience, to see fellow developers at work writing their own tests. I've been with five companies and they all follow a QA-focused process. What we typically do is mark an issue on our project tracker (Redbooth, for example) as something like "send to QA", wait for the lead developer to push to the staging server, which can take a while because the lead dev is usually outsourced and living in a very different time zone. When he finally pushes the code, QA is able to test the new code to see if the issues have been fixed. As the developer I'm not expected to write my own tests there. I don't know what regression means (is that like linear regression?) and wouldn't know which testing framework to use. However, more and more, I have been interviewing with companies that prefer automated testing and developers writing their own tests. They might ask me what my experience with unit testing is, my mind draws a blank and simply say I have no experience with it. I'm sure that's a turn-off for them and now probably see me as a rogue who plays by his own rules, wreaking a tornado of havoc onto well-structured code. Anyways, I want don't want things like a lack of automated testing experience to be an "anti-selling point" anymore. But the companies I worked at didn't have a business case justifying why they should spend expensive developer resources that detracts from something that just works already. "I don't know X but I will have no problem learning it!!" is also not the saving grace at an interview like some people think it does. There has been no instance of me saying I can pick up new knowledge quickly in an interview in which the company gave me an offer. It's getting to the point where now I have to sell businesses cases to remain employable for other companies. Anyone help me out with this, starting with this particular example with TDD?