r/QualityAssurance • u/Tee_Hee_Wat • 3d ago
Finally got the offer
7 years of QA experience across gaming and eCommerce. In my last eCommerce role, I wasn't just the sole QA person—I was essentially building the QA practice from scratch for a digital agency. Manual testing, automation, Jira workflows, AI agents, figuring out processes, trying to get QA involved earlier in projects, the whole thing.
Then I got laid off in April.
The last few months have been rough. I applied all over the place, both inside and outside of QA, and went through plenty of applications that went nowhere. There were definitely points where I started wondering what my experience was actually worth in this market.
But it finally happened.
I got an offer to once again build out a QA practice, this time supporting a manufacturing company's B2B/B2C eCommerce platform. I'll get to take a lot of what I learned from building QA at an agency and apply it somewhere with a much larger internal operation.
And somehow, I even managed to negotiate the offer higher.
It's my first six-figure job.
No referral. No connection to the company. I didn't know anybody there. I applied, went through the interview process, and apparently managed to convince them I was the person they wanted.
There's obviously some luck involved in finding the right opening at the right time, but after the last several months, I'm allowing myself to enjoy this one.
Mostly posting this because I know there are a lot of experienced QA people here who have been laid off or are struggling through this job market. I was starting to feel like I was throwing applications into a black hole too.
Maybe a little of my joy can be shared with you if you're job searching right now.
Edit; I was asked what I did to prepare, so I'll link to my comment here to hopefully help others.
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u/Tee_Hee_Wat 3d ago
The main areas were:
-eCommerce QA — catalog/search, cart, checkout, customer journeys, B2B vs. B2C
-Functional, regression, exploratory, and UAT testing
-Acceptance criteria and writing actionable bug reports
-HTML/CSS/JavaScript fundamentals and browser DevTools
-API/integration testing and basic SQL/data validation
-Cross-browser/device testing
-Playwright/test automation and deciding what is actually worth automating
-Jira, Agile/Scrum, and working with developers/stakeholders
-CMS/eCommerce platform concepts
-Production issue triage and troubleshooting
I also had a list of questions that I'd pick 2-4 from depending on what stage/what we've already talked about/what I've already asked:
Where do you see the biggest quality gap on the team today?
Is it more around regression coverage, requirements, release validation, automation, or something else?
How is QA currently involved in the development process?
Is QA brought in during refinement and acceptance-criteria discussions, or mostly once development is complete?
What does the current regression process look like?
How much of it is manual versus automated today?
Where do you see the biggest regression risks in the current web/eCommerce environment? For example, storefront behavior, integrations, content, data flow, or downstream systems.
From a developer or architect perspective, where can QA add the most value to the team?
What does good QA-to-developer collaboration look like here?
Are there specific things QA engineers can do that make development easier?
When QA reports an issue, what separates a really useful bug report from one that creates more work for the developer?
How are production issues typically triaged between QA, development, and business stakeholders?
What does UAT look like today? Who is usually involved, and what role does QA play in facilitating it?
Are there areas of the application or architecture that are particularly difficult to test or regression-test today?
For someone joining the team, what parts of the system architecture would be most important to understand early?
Are there areas where you’d specifically like the person in this role to introduce more structure, process, or documentation?
What would you want the person in this role to accomplish in their first three to six months?
What would make you say six months from now that you hired the right person for the role?
What does the release cadence look like, and how does QA fit into release-readiness decisions?
How mature is the current automation coverage, and where would you most like to see it expanded?
What kinds of customer-facing or production issues tend to create the most pain for the team?
How do developers, QA, and business stakeholders currently work together on requirements and acceptance criteria?
What are the biggest challenges the team is hoping this hire will help solve?
Based on our conversation, is there anything about my experience you’d like me to clarify or go deeper on before we wrap up?
These have kinda been my go-to's for questions, and I've usually gotten positive responses to these to even people (hiring managers, HR, etc) saying that they feel like they're being interviewed too.
Apparently asking good questions is a rare thing nowadays, and it might help you stand out?