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Employee Spotlight: Manager, Application Engineering 

Sep 11, 2023 | 3 min read

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Roboyo

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We’re excited to introduce you to Oskar Kindbom, hailing from Brisbane, Australia. Oskar wears the hat of Manager of Application Engineering for Quality Assurance and has been a valued member of the Roboyan team since 2020. A big shoutout to Oskar for taking the time to share his insights on life at Roboyo!   

How would you describe your role in the company?  

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​I am the Test Practice Lead. I lead the test effort for all the projects in Australia and set up quality standards, not just for the test practice, but for the development in general.​​​​​​​​​​​​    

​​​​​​What do you think makes our culture unique? 

I like the entrepreneur part of our culture. If you put your best foot forward and do a good job, you will be recognized. There are some work environments where people think “don’t try to be better than anyone else” or “just sit on your chair and do the bare minimum,” but I need to be challenged to enjoy work. 

What are you most proud of? 

I’m most proud of having built a team of really good testers. When we started, we had a whole bunch of developers but no testers in-house. When I joined the company, it was with the intention to build up the practice and get more people on board, and now we have a team of eleven in Australia and another team of six in India.   

How did you start your career?

I was always interested in technical stuff. My dad bought a PC in 1987 and I immediately started exploring and playing around with programming in Basic. After high school I went on to complete an electrical engineering degree, but most of my electives were computer science courses. When it was time to get a job, I was just searching on job sites for the most in-demand jobs at the moment, and there were a lot of testing jobs that came up. So, I thought I’d give it a try and ended up getting a job with a software testing consultancy.

What advice would you give to your younger self?  

To always ask questions, and especially the “why” questions: “why are we doing this?”; “why did you implement it that way?”; “why are we doing things this way?”; ”why are we doing it this way rather than doing it some other way?” 

​​​The testing industry is naturally risk adverse which often means we’re resisting change, but the best practices from 10, 20 or 30 years ago are not necessarily applicable today. Unfortunately, testing is generally not included in the computer science syllabus, and certifications like ISTQB are based on traditional waterfall methods rather than contemporary exploratory testing so it is important to challenge the traditional wisdom to achieve the world class quality that we are aiming for.

What is one thing that surprised you most about your current role:

Something that keeps surprising me is how hard it is to find good testers. We have a lot of people applying, which is great, but we’ve set the bar pretty high. Currently, we’re lucky to have 10 outstanding testers on board, and my aim is to maintain this level of excellence.

If you had three wishes, what would they be? 

I would wish for time, health, and money. Money to afford all the fun things I want to do, and the time and health to enjoy it.

What’s the last song you listened to or your favorite song? 

I have a Radiohead based playlist on Spotify at the moment and the last song that played was a Nirvarna song called Dumb. But I listen to a lot of very varied stuff from 1950s Blues to, electronic music, punk, or jazz.​​​​​​​

What are you currently binge-watching? Or reading? 

I am currently watching Good Omens on Amazon Prime. It’s an English series based on a Terry Pratchett book. I’m also currently reading two work related books. One is Radical Candor by Kim Scott, which is about communication, and I’m also reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries which is about optimizing processes. 

What’s one thing on your bucket list?  

Snowboarding in Alaska has been on my bucket list for many, many years. Whenever you watch any snowboarding or skiing movies, the highlights are always from Alaska.  

THANK YOU OSKAR!

If you want to take your career to the Next Level and join the Roboyo team, we have the perfect role for you. View our job vacancies and apply today! 

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