Reputable resources to prepare for QA or Tester interviews?

Career Hiring
#1

I see that software devs have plenty of good interview preparation resources from reputable sources. For example, for devs we have “cracking the coding interview”, career cup, leet code, hacker rank and dozens of mock interview websites in which a real person interviews you for a fee. Heck, we even have a “cracking the Product Manager/PM interview” book.

But there are hardly any resources for QA or Tester interview prep, let alone “good” resources like the ones above. We mostly have blogs or articles by random people whose quality is questionable. Testing gets at most 5 pages in software dev interview books/websites.

Do you know any good resources for QA interview prep ?

PS - There are plenty of useful blogs on how people became software devs by only getting a coding boot camp degree or by self learning, and without any background in science or engineering. Many of those articles have structured study plans and recommended resources. I hardly see such blogs for becoming QA.

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#2

Have you seen this post written by @cassandrahl, someone who used to be a recruiter?

There is also a great masterclass with @ben.kelly who has years of experience interviewing testers

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#3

@heather_reid - thanks. I wish we also had websites where people could pay reputable testers to do mock interviews for them, like career cup or such. It would be good to have a leet code like website where we have hundreds of test problems. So far, I could not find anything like that specifically for testers. Maybe MOT could provide these features in the future.

#4

Thanks for the mention, @heather_reid.

@raghu, if you’re looking for something more along the lines of how to become a software tester, this might interest you: https://www.ministryoftesting.com/dojo/lessons/how-to-become-a-software-tester-without-a-computer-science-degree

Or if you’re looking for something about how interviews might actually be conducted / the kind of tasks you might expect, there’s also this: https://www.cassandrahl.com/blog/tester-interviews-techniques-and-tasks/

I hope that helps!

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#5

@raghu I know that many people have used the Black Box Puzzles discussed in Live Coaching - Exploring the Black Box Puzzles to both prepare for interview and to interview testers so that might be a useful place to explore too.

#6

@cassandrahl - thanks. I wonder how I can get answers to this question also Where to get testing exercises to practice for interviews?

#7

@heather_reid - thanks. I wonder how I can get answers to this question also Where to get testing exercises to practice for interviews?

#8

This is super detailed, thank you @cassandrahl !!

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#9

@cassandrahl - side note. I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on getting out of the testing career, which is contrary to the theme of this post. Reasons to leave the testing or QA career @heather_reid - your thoughts are welcome too.