Graduated in 2016 with a major in Music Production & Engineering. Principal instrument: guitar.
Position: Software Quality Assurance (“QA”) Engineer at EBay, the large platform for online auctions and other purchases. His job involves testing the software on the front end (what the user sees). He’s on a team of 14, with three other QA engineers, ten software developers, and one product manager. Ming’s job mostly involves writing testing automation code in Javascript in order to test new features. He also sometimes goes through debugging the software with a developer.
Overview: After graduation, Ming moved to L.A. with the goal of being an audio engineer for a music label. Four months later, he was hired! First he was a runner, but in two years he had worked his way up to assistant engineer and then engineer! However, Ming started to suspect that this wasn’t the career he wanted after all. Hours were long and undependable, and he seldom saw the sun. He considered pursuing other careers, but wasn’t sure he could affored more education. Then in 2020 the pandemic hit and he was laid off. While the pandemic was terrible for many in the industry, for Ming it was a great stroke of luck! Unemployment insurance and pandemic aid added up to more than he had been earning at the studio. Ming took advantage of this opportunity to learn a new career, though he negotiated part-time employment at that studio while he was in school.
Ming took Computer Science courses at a community college and earned an associate’s degree in computer science, then in early 2022 he did a four-month program with “Codesmith“, a coding “boot camp” which had good career preparation. Ming applied to many, many jobs as he was finishing. One month after it finished, a friend who works at EBay recommended Ming and he was hired into his current position.
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You can see Ming’s LinkedIn profile here.
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Choice Quotes: “It’s the problem-solving factor of QA. The process of something being broken, finding out what’s wrong, bashing your head against the table to figure out the bug, but then you do and you see it fixed–it’s very satisfying. That said, being a web developer is still my career goal.”
“Quality Assurance is very important. Our website going down for even five minutes could mean millions of dollars lost!”
“Those first 2 years, even 5, out of college, try to say yes to a lot of things. It may not be sustainable but that way you can get a lot of experiences and figure out what you like. Once you have figured out what you like, double down on the skill sets you need to succeed in that field.”
“Referrals really help when looking for a job. They mean skpping having to talk to recruiters. Talking to the engineers directly lets you showcase what you can do even if you don’t have experience.”
“One thing that bummed me out while working in music was I couldn’t afford my own music equipment. I’ve bought more in the last 6 months than during my whole time then.”
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