Learn Not to be Afraid of Doing Things Differently with Maaret Pyhajarvi IT Career Energizer

GUEST BIO:
Maaret Pyhajarvi is an Engineering Manager for F-Secure leading a team while continuing with hands-on testing and programming.
 
In 2016, Maaret was awarded Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person and she has spoken at events in 25 countries delivering close to 400 sessions.  Maaret is also author of two books, Mob Programming Guidebook and Exploratory Testing.
 
EPISODE DESCRIPTION:
Phil’s guest on today’s show is Maaret Pyhajarvi. She is an Eng Manager, Tester, Polyglot Programmer, Conference Designer, Speaker and Author. For the past 25 years she has mainly worked in the testing field and has written two books on the subject. Her Mob Programming Guidebook and Exploratory Testing books are both very well regarded.
Maaret received the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person award, in 2016. She is a well-known conference speaker, who has delivered close to 400 sessions, in 25 countries.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
(1.10) – So Maaret, can I ask you to expand on that brief intro and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Maaret explains that she has been working in the IT testing field, for about 25 years. But, it is only in the past couple of years that she has thought about and started to understand what motivates her and the role she is fulfilling in this industry.
After someone who did not work in the industry asked her what she did for a living she realized that she is actually a feedback fairy. In other words, she finds problems and shares them with the developers in a way that enables them to fix the issue. Something that end-users cannot do, they can only really highlight problems, but do not have the tech knowledge to come up with possible solutions.
(2.14) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Maaret’s advice is to remember that you can craft any job you are given into the job you want.
Over the years, she has been crafting the way she works to better suit each of the companies she works with. Maaret likes to over deliver, to push the boundaries.
People are often surprised by the tasks she carries out. They do not identify some of these things as being tester related. This is evidence that Maaret has been crafting her role into something that better suits her and provides the firms she works for with extra benefits.
Phil asks her if she brings her personal values to her work. Maaret agrees that this is very much the case.
In fact, she has changed the way she works so much that when she took on a management job just 6 months ago, she realized she had been basically filling that role for some time.
If there is a job to do that she knows she is going to enjoy Maaret will usually volunteer or take the initiative and just get it done. It is not always necessary to ask for permission. You just need to be ready to apologize later if you misinterpret what needs to be done. But, usually, you get it right, so apologies are not needed.
(4.08) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. That happened about 10 years ago. She was working as a contractor on the customer organization side and had overall responsibility for a multi-million euro project.
Normally, she would have taken a hands-on approach. But, her then manager asked her to do things differently. They wanted her to focus on the metrics. She was assigned with tracking, preparing and explaining the progress of testing, at boardroom level. Helping the board to understand where the quality was bad, basically, preparing for these discussions. Naturally, that is what she did, barely touching the application itself.
The system they were developing and testing had multiple customers. So, usually there were two other big contractors, representing two other user clients in the boardroom with her. One day, when a big decision was about to be made, at the door of the meeting room, these two people told her they could not come into the meeti