Skill Assessment:
Mindset Questions - Questions about your experience in general.
Exploratory Testing - General Exploratory Testing task for a feature in Confluence. Very easy. Need to remember they are looking to cover all aspects and not just feature testing or regression testing.
Automation Framework. - Easy to implement if you know any language and have familiarity with Selenium Webdriver.
I cleared the skill assessment with ease.
The technical interview was generally a good experience but there were a few things that I didn't really think matched my expectations.
The interview had 3 phases :
1. General Questions - Focussed around current experience and also around Coaching Devs, I did reasonably okay in it as I had prior experience in coaching devs, but honestly, I don't look forward to wearing 500 hats in my job, i like a specialist role.
2. Code Review - It had a code snippet where I was expected to find bugs in the code, expected to find 3 , I found 2 before the time ran out. This was a good exercise and something I hadn't experienced in past. I am happy I did okay here.
3. Technical Questions- Mostly around non-functional testing like Performance and Security.
They were interested to know how I can influence the developers into thinking of these aspects from the beginning. I tried my best but honestly speaking, I knew I am not a good fit here because I am not a coach.
Generally speaking, I had expected a few questions around the responses I had provided in the Skill Assessment, in particular from the mindset exercise, because the skill assessment clearly mentioned there will be questioning around them, which didn't happen.
This is probably very important for anyone who applies at Atlassian:
The job title can somewhat confuse you into thinking there is much hands on as an Engineering role would entail. Quality Engineers for Atlassian means you work as a consultant or a coach expected to do no hands-on testing or automation.
Although, I acknowledge that the recruiter mentioned to me during my initial screening that this is not a hands-on role but I wanted to know this from the Quality engineers themselves, hence I kept going through the initial phases of the interview.
If I am being utterly honest with you, I knew it wasn’t meant to be because I consider myself to be more hands-on and hypothetically speaking, it felt like I am part of a football team where I am selected only to spend my time on the bench forever.
Certainly not for me.
I wish my honest response here helps anyone who interviews for QE roles at Atlassian.