If you’ve interviewed for an SDET, TE, or QA role recently, you’ve likely felt the frustration. The process is a chaotic, unpredictable gauntlet. One company grills you on LeetCode-style algorithms indistinguishable from a senior developer loop, while the next asks zero coding questions and focuses entirely on high-level test strategy. As one engineer put it, “Every interview I’ve done was completely different”.
This isn’t random. It’s a symptom of a deeper, industry-wide identity crisis over what an SDET truly is. This ambiguity forces us, the candidates, into a high-stakes guessing game, preparing for everything at once. My analysis of countless interview experiences reveals two critical flaws in the modern process that directly harm both candidates and companies.
Flaw #1: The Technical Gauntlet Tests the Wrong Skills.
The most common complaint is the over-reliance on abstract coding problems that are “utterly unrelated to testing”. The reality of our work is building clean, maintainable, and scalable automation frameworks — prioritizing “repeatable, linear, low impact code.” Yet, we are often judged on our ability to “solve a tree pivot in the fastest way possible”. This disconnect is a poor proxy for skill and often reflects an interviewer who doesn’t truly understand the craft of test engineering.
This is compounded by the “take-home trap,” where candidates are given excessively long, unpaid assignments — sometimes requiring 10–20 hours of work — that feel more like free labor than a fair evaluation. A process that cannot assess your skills in a reasonable, time-boxed manner is a major red flag.
Flaw #2: The Process Devalues the “Tester’s Mindset.”
More importantly, the obsession with pure coding challenges often fails to assess the single most valuable asset a quality professional brings: the “tester’s mindset.” The true art of our profession lies in our inquisitive nature, our ability to analyze risk, and our skill in asking the right questions.
Great hiring managers know this. They care less about a perfect solution and more about your thought process and how you communicate it. The key differentiator is moving beyond simply “Solving Problems” to “Explaining Solutions”. When an interview process reduces our craft to mere “lines of code and not the art that is software testing,” it filters for coders but misses out on true quality champions.
The Path Forward: Strategic Preparation and the Power of Practice
The problem isn’t a lack of talent; it’s a lack of a strategic approach to this broken system. Simply “grinding LeetCode” is not enough. To succeed, you need a playbook — a system for diagnosing the interview type, preparing for a wide range of technical and behavioral scenarios, and mastering the meta-game of the hiring process.
This is why deliberate practice, especially through mock interviews, is the single most effective vehicle for success. Practicing with peers in a realistic setting is where you bridge the gap between theory and performance. It’s where you build the muscle memory to articulate your thought process under pressure, refine your STAR method stories, and gain the confidence to walk into any interview room — no matter how chaotic — and demonstrate your true value.
This analysis is the reason I’ve focused on creating resources like ‘The SDET Playbook’ and the r/TheSDETPlaybook, The SDET/TE/QA Network community. My goal is to equip engineers with the strategic tools they need and, more importantly, to create a space where we can practice, share insights, and master this process together.
The system may be flawed, but it is not unbeatable. Let’s start the conversation. Join us at r/TheSDETPlaybook/ and The SDET/TE/QA Network to share your experiences and strategies.
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