Another interview

I have taken 100s of interviews. Interviewing and short listing the right candidate is one of the key requirement for my job. Last Friday my boss and HR called me to take a couple of interviews. I was not surprised as I take interviews. But then my boss said, the interviews were not for JAVA professionals, rather it is for QA engineers. He then told me the mandate. I would be looking at the skill sets beyond functional testing.

First round of the interviews were to be conducted by our senior QA engineers, who would look at functional testing use case writing etc. I would look at the knowledge beyond QA. I would look at stretch goals such as do they know how to deploy application, how to look logs and provide some useful information to development beyond a bug. Can they help development reproduce the bug in development if it were not reproducible. We have an aggressive growth plan, so need resources urgently, but we don't want to hire the wrong person. So I was anxious to do the job and tensed if I will be able to do it right.

I met with a senior QA engineer to understand what they are looking for. What are the typical questions they ask. I was working with the QA team closely, so I have a clear understanding about their work and expectations. Then came the interview time, I have to meet the candidates after met by a senior QA engineers. I was tensed for the first guy, and the tension reduced gradually. Asked them from a range of questions unit testing, functional testing to some UNIX commands and deployment and puzzles.

I figured out it was just another day with a new experience.