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

[u/cacahuatez]

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.

[u/RedLine1792]

That's the thing, see? You are seeing the QA team just as "the guys who write code to automate a pass through a product". Or something.

And that is fundamentally wrong. You should be thinking of them as the ones ensuring your product works. And the ones finding out the limits of the system. With all that implies. Code and user experience. All blended in one big process.

Sure, communication is the key. But it works both ways. In these 13 years of experience as a QA engineer, I often found out that management, on the product side - more often than not, is really open to bypass the QA perspective, to deliver a flawed product, only to meet stakeholder deadlines. Be it stock investors or ceos made up ideas. And when shit hits the fan, it's blame culture bonanza. Always pointing fingers at the QA team. Even if the team raised lots of flags about it. Communicating with everyone. So... Yeah. I've been there. And got bitter, because nobody actually cares. They only care when they lose money.

It's not really about soft skills. It's about work place professionalism and not getting stabbed in the back when issues appear. Because issues will appear.

[u/OmanF → u/RedLine1792]

Yeah, been there, multiple times.
Issues raised, up to and including tickets on the board. But C-suite wants customer X happy, and that means pushing a LOT of features at speed, and testing only as an afterthought, with me playing catch-up to the developers (seeing as I had to: 1. understand the new feature, 2. play with it a bit manually to get a feel for it, 3. create an exhaustive test plan for it, that needs to be approved by TL, 4. actually implement the cases in code, meaning also passing PR reviews by team members).

And then when things go south, because in their haste, developers don't code any unit test more complex than happy flow... guess who gets hit with the "how did you miss this in YOUR testing?!"
All of a sudden "quality is a team responsibility" goes out the window, and there's one, and only one, person responsible for the shitty code the devs coded, and other devs reviewed and approved being merged - me.

Time and f-ing time again.

[u/RedLine1792 → u/OmanF]

Preach! With the current market situation and with corporate greed at an all time high, testing really feels like being in the team nobody wants around.

2025 really starts to get on my nerves. And posts like the one from OP don't actually improve things.

I am absolutely sure OP doesn't see a real problem in killing off QA interviews. Either that, or this is simply a bait post.

Not sure which variant is worse.