Probably the worst Interview experience I have had in my career of 11 years. For the record I am a Lead in my current company and I got promoted to Lead within the first 6 months(probation period) in my first job in Australia (i.e no prior local exp in AU). If you come across anyone who get promoted within his/her probation period, please message me personally. The company is not a 4-employee company, we are 600 people in 4 different continents.
Got shortlisted within a week of applying as 99% of my skills matched the job requirement and got a call of HR where she asked few basic technical screening questions related to Testing(these questions were pre-written by the Test team ofcourse). Answered each one of correctly and application got forwarded to the next round immediately i.e online screenshare/CodePair(from HackerRank) tech coding interview session with the Test Lead and one other tester. This all happened within a week and I was pleasantly surprised at the pace my application moved ahead and the response time provided the recruiters and HR have to go thru 100s of resumes per day.
Now the hilarious part. Instead of asking questions related to testing or tech tools they use in Canva or those mentioned in the job ad, they asked me to write a program to ‘Find the no. of palindromes in a given string’. Would you believe it? Com’on Canva, for a guy with 11 yrs of exp, who decides the tech and tools and builds them from scratch and then tests and deploys it, you ask some elementary questions from the corner of some programming exercise books like ‘Check if a given no. of even or odd?’, ‘Print prime numbers between 1 to 100?’ You gotta be kidding me. Do you seriously think writing a program to find the palindrome is the best way to test a candidate’s testing ability? Solutions to these can be found within 2 minutes if you have ever heard of something known as Google. But the testing mindset, test strategies and planning acumen is not possessed by palindrome finders. I can give the interviewers 100 other programs which I bet they can’t solve in days that doesn’t mean they are not good at their job.
Writing some code is not the only way to test if a candidate can do the job or not. Screen the candidate on the job you want him to perform after he comes on board.
I am sure your QA engineers dont write programs to find palindromes or test if a no. is even/odd in their day to day job or I may be wrong?
I wasted 1 hour of my precious time interviewing with Canva.
