The interview process for the Senior QA Engineer position consisted of 4 rounds and lasted almost 3 weeks.Round 1: Recruiter Screening (30 minutes) The recruiter asked very basic questions about my notice period and current salary. She seemed unprepared and kept mixing up the role with a development position. When I tried to explain my experience in automation, she interrupted me saying “Yeah, yeah, testing stuff” and moved on.Round 2: Technical Screening (45 minutes) The interviewer joined 15 minutes late. He asked me to explain the difference between Smoke and Sanity testing but cut me off after 20 seconds. Most questions were theoretical and outdated (e.g., “Write test cases for a login page” on a shared notepad). When I mentioned API testing with Postman and REST Assured, he asked, “Is that even necessary?” He appeared distracted and was typing on his other laptop throughout the call.Round 3: Automation Round (1 hour) They asked me to write a Selenium script for a dynamic web table live on the shared screen. The interviewer kept arguing that my approach was wrong even though it was correct. He insisted on using Thread.sleep() everywhere and rejected Page Object Model saying “It’s overcomplicating simple things.” When the code had a small syntax error due to nervousness, he made a long face and said, “Even freshers don’t make this mistake.”Round 4: Managerial + HR Round The manager spent most of the time complaining about how the current QA team is “not delivering” and how they expect the new joiner to “fix everything in 2 months.” He showed zero interest in my achievements and only asked about my availability to join early. The HR person asked strange questions like “How do you handle pressure when developers blame QA for their bugs?” and “Will you work on weekends if there is a release?”Overall Experience Multiple rescheduling of interviews with very short notice. Interviewers were rude and dismissive. Questions were not aligned with the job description (JD mentioned Cypress and Playwright, but they only asked about Selenium). No proper feedback was given at the end. The entire process felt chaotic and unprofessional. I felt demotivated after the interviews and decided to reject the offer even though it was selected.

I was reached out by a recruiter and then setup for the interview. The interview consists of 3 rounds, and all of them are a bit casual chat on a system design. I thought I was doing okay, and I provided more than one possible solution to the questions. I don’t think I clearly say I didn’t know something, as I answered most of the asks. But still I got rejected due to 2 reasons per the HR. First off, one of the interviewers is saying, I didn’t demonstrate enough attitude, and lack of desire to join the company, like I should demonstrate them I enjoy their technical challenges or something. This is beyond me. First, I did ask them what they are building and what the challenges are and the discussion lasted 3, 4 minutes. This interviewer straight up lying. Second, I told them the reason why I am switching my job, is due to a very practical reason, and my team are all good people. It’s just the RTO arrangement doesn’t work quite well for me. I also mentioned that I used to work at traditional banks, and the pace is very slow. Newer FinTech companies are fast in adapting changes which is something I do enjoy. If I am not determined to make a change, why do I bother taking a job interview? And again, how can you quantify attitude? I can pretend to be super excited and slacking off right after I am hired. Still, if he intended to misinterpret my willingness to join, sure. This is utterly unprofessional I must say. Second, they mention, I am not demonstrating enough knowledge on transactions. Well, I am not sure how much is enough. I said, code wise, a @Transactional annotation would do. And in a distributed system, you can consider use MQ to ensure message is delivered once, or consider using Redis cache lock to be more performant. I even mentioned that @Transactional would use cglib to regenerate the code, and wrap it with transaction, commit, rollback method. The reason sounds to me like, you said you know Java, but you don’t understand what a Serializable interface does, so you are not great. Not to mention some of the techniques I told them, they don’t seem to know about, or it’s like their first time knowing it. Again, I am deeply disappointed, and yet HR has to call me to tell you are doing great, most of the feedback is positive, but you are not chosen. I have notes on the entire interview process, just to be clear. So, I can back track what people say.