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dkotschessaa
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One of my longer posts. Please stay with me!
Background:
So as some of you know, for personal and financial reasons I had to leave school a bit early to get work and support my family. I was *almost* done anyway. I need only the qualifier for my master's (in pure math) and I was only taking another semester of classes because my TAship was covering them, and hey, free classes.
I started out as a contractor in the first place that would hire me. I wasn't excited about the job at first, but I ended up really loving the work, the people etc. The feeling is mutual - they love me back and have offered permanency.
What I was *starting* to look into was going into more data science. They don't have that here exactly - or at least, not yet. The company is growing and I believe the industry may go more in that direction.
Here's what I can tell you about the company and the kind of work: They are a payments processing company. So I am learning about bank networks, credit card processing, settlement, all that sort of thing. The testing right now is manual, but eventually I will be learning about automated testing. They have trusted me to write manual test scripts and even entire test plans for a new project (unprecedented for a contractor!) so they are really trying to see what I can do.
I am quite certain java and SQL will come into play somewhere down the line. We use splunk to get to some of our transactions and I believe this is a tool being used by data scientists. (In fact I'm not sure we are using it to it's full potential, so I think I can help out a lot here). I could potentially move into roles that involve more programming, and I am excited by that possibility as well.
There is a whole science to QA as well that is a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. The things nobody tells you!
So I am wondering if anybody here with a math/physics background has done work in either payments processing or software testing and can tell me how someone like me can leverage my background. At bare minimum it's a great place to pick up a lot of great skills, but I'd really like to stay and carve out a role here. It is hard to explain how my math background comes into play - basically software testing is a huge science experiment with lots of permutations and variables and requires very good reasoning to do well.
Thanks,
-Dave K
Background:
So as some of you know, for personal and financial reasons I had to leave school a bit early to get work and support my family. I was *almost* done anyway. I need only the qualifier for my master's (in pure math) and I was only taking another semester of classes because my TAship was covering them, and hey, free classes.
I started out as a contractor in the first place that would hire me. I wasn't excited about the job at first, but I ended up really loving the work, the people etc. The feeling is mutual - they love me back and have offered permanency.
What I was *starting* to look into was going into more data science. They don't have that here exactly - or at least, not yet. The company is growing and I believe the industry may go more in that direction.
Here's what I can tell you about the company and the kind of work: They are a payments processing company. So I am learning about bank networks, credit card processing, settlement, all that sort of thing. The testing right now is manual, but eventually I will be learning about automated testing. They have trusted me to write manual test scripts and even entire test plans for a new project (unprecedented for a contractor!) so they are really trying to see what I can do.
I am quite certain java and SQL will come into play somewhere down the line. We use splunk to get to some of our transactions and I believe this is a tool being used by data scientists. (In fact I'm not sure we are using it to it's full potential, so I think I can help out a lot here). I could potentially move into roles that involve more programming, and I am excited by that possibility as well.
There is a whole science to QA as well that is a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. The things nobody tells you!
So I am wondering if anybody here with a math/physics background has done work in either payments processing or software testing and can tell me how someone like me can leverage my background. At bare minimum it's a great place to pick up a lot of great skills, but I'd really like to stay and carve out a role here. It is hard to explain how my math background comes into play - basically software testing is a huge science experiment with lots of permutations and variables and requires very good reasoning to do well.
Thanks,
-Dave K