I kinda have the print edition of the Onion to thank for my career.

Back in 2000, I had a "100% travel" tech consulting job. My favorite part of the week was finally getting back home to Chicago, grabbing a sub at a sandwich shop, and casually reading that week's edition cover to cover Saturday afternoon.

One particular week, there was an ad for a local tech company (ThoughtWorks). I don't remember there being many tech job ads in the Onion at the time, so it stood out. I remember the ad copy being something like "Does your life suck, or just your job? Work here instead." I immediately applied, interviewed, eventually got an offer, quit my other job, and started at ThoughtWorks. It was a massive upgrade.

A few years later, I got to lead an internal dev team, and a spin-off project (Selenium) came out of that.

Long story long: No Onion, no job at ThoughtWorks, no Selenium.

Glad a new generation gets to enjoy leisurely reading fake news and seeing where it takes them in life.

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emccue 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Selenium?

That stack birthed almost an entire category of QA jobs.

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calmbonsai 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Awesome story. hat-tip

Selenium is useful beyond testing too.

I "optimized around" some tedious expense report filing a few years back with it.

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hugs 3 days ago | parent [-]

the project that selenium was extracted from was... a timesheet and expense reporting system!

	▲	calmbonsai 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Wow! I had no idea! Thanks for sharing that.
	▲	codeduck 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's the circle of life!

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Mr_Bees69 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So the onion is, by distant proxy, responsible for that time my school blocked all non-chrome browsers on their gradebook, messing up all the teachers who use edge. Have you ever tried Helium? (https://helium.readthedocs.io/)

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hugs 3 days ago | parent [-]

wow, that's nuts. i don't see the connection, though? were people using selenium on the gradebook? selenium drives chrome, too.

haven't used helium before.

	▲	Mr_Bees69 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The grading situation sucked (disconnects between services), i was using selenium with the firefox driver to create a 3rd party service with data normalization, i think the auditor that was looking at logs was unhappy with the github codespace ip i was using and decided that chrome is superior.

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Melatonic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like there's a funny Onion article version of this story :-D

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tombert 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Traveling Businessman Makes QA Automator After Mistaking Joke Newspaper For Reality.

	▲	linkjuice4all 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Authentic News, Ad Clicks Faked
	▲	aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Area Man
	▲	hugs 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		a slightly more generalized re-mix: skynet inventor credits dystopian fake news for inspiration to create dystopian reality

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3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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burnt-resistor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TO is supposed to transport you away from life suck for 0.5-10 seconds. No warranties or refunds though.

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ratelimitsteve 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I need to thank you for my first job out of college (auto QA for a spring/ReST web app) and also for helping me automate several browser games.

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metalman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

localy the equivilant would be if The Coast came back to print.Phones suck for staying in touch with the local sceen.I have noticed a significant increase in postering for events, music and a few more local only type retail stores,and millenials leaning in on traditional trades, craftwork, art, etc. I mean nothing beats a good meme or wacked video on tictok etall, but then it's like time to do something, and the algorythim isn't set up for that.

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pyrolistical 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have such emotional damage with Selenium. But atlas the limits of the tools at the time.

Puppeteer was such a breathe of fresh air. It supported waiting for element change instead of timeouts or polling

	▲	hugs 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		i'm always amazed by the over-the-top criticism. did you pay money for it? were you forced to use it? did you try to help improve it?

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pyrolistical 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have such emotional damage with Selenium. But atlas the limits of the tools at the time.

Puppeteer was such a breathe of fresh air.

	▲	steve_adams_86 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wrote so many sophisticated, nearly magical Selenium helpers in PHP for massive test suites for a fairly prominent website in the early 2000s. I remember simultaneously having a sense of great accomplishment and deep shame and frustration, haha. It was so hard to build good testing tools. I think we did alright, though. These days I write automated UI tests with barely a second thought. It has gotten so much easier. It turns out it came out in 2004. I had no idea I was working with cutting edge testing software at the time. That also explains why it was so rough on the edges and there were so few resources to draw on to get it working better in edge cases. Although it was kind of brutal, I think selenium taught me a ton about asynchronicity and concurrency. That was probably good for my career