Practice for job interviews

Hi there,

I am going to have an interview for a Test Engineer role and I would like to practice for that. While there are tons of places to practice coding interviews or system design and also a couple of sites to do mutual mock phone interviews, I did not find something similar for testing.

I have worked in different roles e.g., software developer, integrator, technical coach but not as a dedicated tester. However, I would like to go into this direction.

What I am looking for is ideally some sample questions from interviews with a solution. I’m missing especially the possibility to get feedback from the solution part. Of course I can practice by trying to answer “how do you test …”, but without feedback I’ll never know if I missed an important part.

Do you know any good resources? Any other tips to prepare for the interview?

And a second question: as the interview will cover also the usual coding part, can you share some experience what might be different from an interview for a developer role?

Thanks and best regards,
Michael

Hello @mi7359!

Welcome to the community!

I have been working as a Test Engineer for about nine years. When I started in the role, it was very much oriented toward creating programmatic solutions for testing challenges. We had multiple efforts to create frameworks for solving the same challenge in different groups. We also had efforts to create utilities for generating test data or inspecting test results.

In my opinion, many of the efforts were more demonstrations of technical prowess. Some of those frameworks require a team of “test engineers” to maintain them, and the framework has a steep learning curve. That team, in my opinion, is no longer providing test engineering services rather they developers maintaining a product.

My point is that while coding skills are necessary they are not the focus of a Test Engineer. The Test Engineer assists those who test by recommending solutions that improve reach, efficiency, or effectiveness of those who test. Keep in mind that “those who test” include developers. Providing automation (code that tests code) might be one of those solutions but I apply it sparingly.

If I were interviewing a Test Engineering candidate, I want to know about their testing training or experience, types of testing solutions they have provided and why, and evaluate their collaboration skills (testing is a very social activity).

Joe

Try vcruit. At least this experience would give you interview experience

Its almost 2021. There are still zero useful interview prep resources for tester interviews. I don’t know why this is so. Maybe because there is much more demand for software developers than qa. So, its profitable for companies to create interview prep resources for developers.

So far, it seems that people will keep posting questions like “how to hire testers” and keep ranting about hiring problems, but no one will do anything to actually solve the hiring problems. This is not a new problem. I am pretty sure we’ll face the same problem 10 years later, assuming that the qa role does not get merged into dev.