I see a lot of companies who have trouble getting started with quality assurance and test positions. They do a lot of interviewing but make a lot of mistakes when bringing in those crucial first people that will let them scale for the future. These companies look for things like “ability to write test cases” or “knowledge of automation.” They don’t look for people who have specialized in testing. But what does that even mean?

Continue reading Hire Your Test Specialists First →

I previously talked about some heuristics for hiring test specialists. There was an assumption in that post that you do, in fact, want to hire specialist testers. But, of course, that is just an assumption. Perhaps you don’t. And before you say “But of course we do!”, let’s talk about this a little bit. Continue reading Should We Hire Specialist Testers? →

I’ve talked quite a bit about the interview process for testers. Here I’ll try to distill some of that material around my experiences with hiring test specialists. By this term, I mean exactly what it sounds like: people who have chosen to specialize in the discipline of testing. Continue reading Heuristics for Hiring Specialist Testers →

There is still so much wrong with how testers — even those who will write automation — are interviewed. I talked about this already regarding how technical test interviews are broken and about interviewing technical testers more broadly. Is there really more to say? I think so; let’s see if you agree. Continue reading Interviewing a Tester as Developer →

Here I’m not speaking to the people who are interviewing for roles in automation. I’m speaking to the people hiring them. The interview process is entirely broken in so many places. According to Eric Elliot, code-based interviews have always been broken. And he’s probably right. Sahat Yalkabov said something similar. He’s probably right too. But here I’m focusing on the companies and hiring managers that are exacerbating the technocrat problem. So let’s talk about this. Continue reading Technical Test Interviews are Broken →

In our testing industry we’ve borrowed ideas from the physics realm to provide ourselves some glib phrases. For example, you’ll hear about “Schrödinger tests” and “Heisenbugs.” It’s all in good fun but, in fact, the way that physics developed over time certainly has a great deal of corollaries with our testing discipline. I already wasted people’s precious time talking about what particle physics can teach us about testing. But now I’m going to double down on that, broaden the scope a bit, and look at a wider swath of physics. Continue reading Reframing Test Interviews with Gamification →

One of my pet peeves in the industry is the often very lackluster ways I see testers being interviewed. So let’s talk about that a bit.

I recently did an interview for a “technical testing” position and it was one where they had you do a whole lot of exercises for coding. In fact, as far as I could tell, that’s pretty much what all the interviews were going to be. The interview was thus, to me, largely a waste of time. I actually told the interviewers that and, to be fair to them, they were quite gracious, did engage me in discussion, and actually seemed to agree with me on a few points. But here I want to talk about why I felt the interview was a waste of time and what role “coding exercises” have when hiring so-called “technical testers.”