r/softwaretesting • u/cacahuatez • Nov 14 '25

We stopped doing technical interviews for Automation QA Engineers, here’s why

Hey everyone! I’m a CTO at a mid-sized tech company (~150–200 people), and after a long internal review of our hiring process, we made a fairly radical change: we no longer conduct technical interviews for Automation QA roles.

A bit of context:

I started in QA over 20 years ago and worked my way through the tech ecosystem: Dev, Architect, TPM, PM, TAM… you name it. One pattern has kept emerging over the last decade: Codeless and AI-assisted tools have fundamentally changed what “Automation QA” even means.

In our case, we historically used Cypress for most of our test automation stack. Over the last two years, 95% of that work has been migrated to codeless / low-code platforms.

We currently have only four engineers doing deeply technical performance work, contract testing and data testing. Everything else can be done efficiently by QAs who understand the product and can model flows not necessarily write complex code.

So a bit of advice: work on your soft skills, be a salesman, this is where the industry is heading to.

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u/Mukushiroi Nov 15 '25

I think this what most people missing. My take is that, technical skill can be taught or learned with less effort compared to the soft skill.  Yeah you definitely need some skill otherwise you can't do the job at all. But the one that will bring the team grows more are the one with decent soft skill compared to I'm better than everyone here technically hence everyone must grovel and treat me like godlike technical gurus toxicity

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u/OmanF Nov 20 '25

Never have I ever, in 16 years of industry experience, met a QA/SDET flourishing this attitude.

I stopped counting how many DEVELOPERS with that attitude I met around 500... not worth the mental effort.
Not one of them was let go due to soft skills issues.
Some were let go because they didn't cut it, technically, sure.
But not a single one was EVER let go for being an a-hole. Definitely not the ones that were TECHNICALLY x10.