
QA job interview questions for managers to ask - ohjeez
https://www.functionize.com/blog/the-best-qa-job-interview-questions-for-managers-to-ask/
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inglor
This smells of a marketing article shoved to the homepage. I'm not a fan of
the trend I'm seeing of articles with little technical merit suddenly making
it on the homepage next to legitimate technology pieces.

I'm not sure what HN can do about it and maybe I'm just cynical and people
genuinely think this PR piece has good technical value and "How do you test a
soda machine?" is a good QA question.

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lefstathiou
So what is?

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tdsamardzhiev
He's right though, not even Paul Graham's blog gets 25 HN posts in 3 months.

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shaggyfrog
How the heck does this get onto the front page?

The top question is "What methodologies have you used?" \-- is this a joke?
The answer will tell you nothing about the candidate's ability to do a good
job.

This article is a waste of time.

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ohjeez
It says up front: Get the obvious questions out of the way (such as "what
methodologies do you use") so you can put your attention on the ones that
matter.

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quicklime
Why get them "out of the way" when you can just skip asking pointless
questions?

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ohjeez
Because there ARE good reasons to ask job candidates about the skills they put
on their resumes. Some people add the keywords to be buzzword-compliant.
Others include a tool or technology in passing, as a summary of 5 years of
work with it... and if it's important in your shop, it'e reasonable to ask
about it. Find out whether "experienced with ToolName" means "I once started
up the app" or "I can make it dance."

My resume barely mentions OS/2 anymore, because I'm unlikely to get a job that
requires the knowledge. But if I happened to interview at a company where it
mattered (perhaps for legacy tech) or where the interviewer shared an interest
("oh! something we can chat about!") then it's a reasonable topic of
discussion.

Also, interviewees expect those questions. They can be a kind of throat
clearing. That is... get 'em out of the way.

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someone7x
"Best Catch" and "One That Got Away" are the only good questions here, and
"Best Catch" is the only one I ask every single time.

This is one of the most important question because it reveals the "soul" of
the tester; the flavor of brokenness that excites them most.

For every once in a lifetime "you won't believe it, but..." answer there are
dozens of boring "one time mysql went down on prod" answers. It's not a golden
snitch or anything like that, but I find it to be indispensable in the
interview process.

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folex
Looks like another marketing article, empty of any insight.

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KukicAdnan
Looks like HN should have used Functionize(r)(tm) to test their software to
make sure this doesn't happen.

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dmundhra
I am a developer who happen to also have to manage a QA team and found this
article interesting to atleast ask some questions to get the interview warmed
up. Otherwise I always struggled to find good questions to ask for a QA
interview. Am sure if I had googled I might have found something- but I never
did. This coming on the HN feed just removed that friction too for me to read!

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genev
This is just blog spam.

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socketnaut
Had to triple check that this wasn't satire after reading the first two
points. Focusing on familiarity with buzzwords and trendy tools is exactly the
wrong thing to do.

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ninedays
QA here. The article is decent for someone who has little to no experience in
the field and wishes to know more about QA practices or processes.

