Corporate structure

Over the summer I worked at a company with a rather unusual corporate structure. The company was called Aspiritech and did QA testing for a variety of companies, with Bose and Amazon being among them. While the company had certainly grown from its humble beginnings, it still only had around a hundred people employed. Perhaps it was this small amount of employees that led to its fluid and bare bones corporate structure. The minimal structure of the organization became apparent during my training as I discovered that the employees who were training me were themselves hired not too long ago. The nature of the company itself also meant that the guidelines for the QA were not determined by anyone at Aspiritech. Instead, testing procedures were written by the company that supplied the products and it was the job of the employees to run the tests as specified. 

That being said, there was at least some interactions between the testers. Once a week, meetings would be held to go over the projects, discuss any errors we had found and ensuring that all errors were logged properly. Beyond that, whatever test cases everyone worked on was determined by first come first serve. Not everyone fully understood how every feature of every device worked so instead people just tended to do whatever test cases they could finish with ease. While this worked out for the most part, it did cause a couple of issues near the end of a testing cycle. The company had a finite number of each product so if all the remaining tests required the same device than there would not be enough for everyone. There was also the issue of employees not having the skills to do any of the remaining tests. When this occurred, the employee would just do exploratory testing. Exploratory testing is when you use a product without following a test case and just start playing with the various features and record any defects you discovered. In other words, hitting every button and running every program until something breaks. While this can be productive in its own right, I have gone entire days without finding a thing, which makes me feel like I could have been more productive elsewhere.

As I mentioned earlier, Aspiritech was a rather small company and that meant that the allocation of human capital within certain departments of that structure was poorly distributed. A particular example of note would be the HR department. While I say department, It is just one woman. As there are only two locations for the company, I imagine the other office has a similarly scarce HR staff. As I mentioned before, Asprirtech has a rather bare-bones corporate structure. This is rather different from my time working at crate and barrel, a much larger and more fully staffed company.

When I worked there, roles were much more well defined and the management exercised a more concrete authority. There were teams in charge of decorating the store, managing the cash register, bringing out more items to restock shelves and everything else. Even when there were other people working in the stock room with me, each of us had distinct roles. One person would wrap up reserved orders and bring them out to customers. Another would put away returned products. Another would take down and open products so that they would be immediately available. Unlike Aspiritech, the management would decide who was responsible for what each day, leaving the regular employees with no real autonomy. The work environment also left little room to socialize as each person was much more isolated.