On the way to his current job, Alexander Krivotko from Kiev did not take the most standard and easy path. He studied testing theory and Java to fulfill his dream of becoming a highly paid tester. You can learn a lot from his experience: hard work, a grain of healthy adventurism and luck will help you. Below is his success story.
Brief chronology of events
Worked as a system administrator for 5 years. The salary was about 1000 dollars, but fell to 300 along with the dollar;
Completed 18 levels in JavaRush in a year;
I studied testing theory and automation for six months;
Passed 30 interviews for the position of junior and middle level tester; (mostly the latter). This lasted 3 months;
I'm applying for a job as a QA Automation intern. I have been working for three months with a salary of $700;
I lose my job and look for another one within three months;
I am going through 20 interviews. After them I find a job as Senior QA Automation Engineer . I have been working for 1 year, with a salary of $2500;
I lose my job and within a month I’m looking for another one;
One interview and I immediately find a job as Senior QA Automation Engineer/QA Lead. 1 year, salary - $4000;
I lose my job and within three months I’m looking for another one;
I am going through 25 interviews. I find a job as a Senior QA Automation Engineer - I’ve been working for a month now, the salary is $5,000;
And now - the details
How do you like this way of the samurai? I think it's impressive, especially that after three months as an intern, I landed a Senior QA Automation position. You're probably wondering how I did this? In a nutshell, my success is based on this:
Lying on your resume;
Ability to pass an interview (50% success!);
Luck(!);
Impudence in the ability to ask for a lot of money;
Emotional stability in interviews;
I will try to analyze all five points.
The employer must be confident that the person will cope with the job. He certainly won’t figure this out in depth in just one hour. He will see some experience on the resume and will try to make sure that the candidate's knowledge is relevant to this experience. Typically, this knowledge is tested by standard questions that can be mastered during interviews. If there is no real experience, you can invent it for your resume. You will say: “it is not good to deceive,” and you will be right. However, if you get the job, even if you fail at it, you will gain invaluable experience, and even money to boot. Of course, if you fail, you need to be prepared to be “expelled” after the probationary period. However, your experience materialized. He is no longer 100% fictional.
When I was an intern at a medium-sized IT company, I learned a little bit of everything. I didn’t really manage to code, but at this job I got into free courses in Java, and I willingly attended them. After three months of internship, Team Lead said that there was no project for me at the moment, and that I would be better off looking for a job as an automation engineer. They say that I’m too smart for a manual technician and it’s not my thing. Moreover, he was the only one who advised me to go straight to the Senior position. The rest pointed their finger at this and told me to look for a Junior Automator position... I didn’t listen to them. I decided that it was better to listen to the advice of a person who knows how to attract money than those who know how to do it not so well. After that, I started going to interviews only at the senior level. He asked for 2.5 thousand dollars. In my resume I lied that I had 3 years of experience in QA, 2 of which were in Automation.
I knew that if I went through a lot of interviews, sooner or later they would not ask me what I didn’t know and would only ask me what I knew. And so it happened. I was hired to automate the API with the condition that they would teach me. Since there are few QAs on the market who know how to do this. As a result, I get $2.5k without automation experience and at the same time they teach me! Luck played a role here, of course. Plus the theory of probability in the form “if you suffer for a long time, something will work out.”
Note: at Junior and Senior level interviews they ask the same thing, and the result depends on the level of preparation for the questions. The scheme is as follows: you go to an interview, fail it, write down questions, study. Then you go to the interview again. As a result, 80-90% of the questions have knowledge.
About arrogance. All “galley rowers” of countries, let’s say, not of the first world, know how much money they earn from them. So I decided that I also want to have enough money for my work. And after the project ended, I began to ask for even more money. In fact, at this stage I was lucky again, I interviewed with only one company and passed right away. I was not asked a single technical question. They just asked me how it was on my previous project, what exactly I did and the like. I knew that the company was from Silicon Valley, so I was not modest in my requests.
In the 2.5 years that I have been working, I have had about 80 interviews. Yes, I kept records. I don't even know why. In fact, it requires enormous emotional effort. During all this time, I never learned to relax and was almost always nervous before interviews. It happened that he took a sedative. Withstanding this stress was the most difficult test for me. Nevertheless, I persevered.
Results
I have currently found a remote job with a company headquartered in the USA. I get paid hourly, P33$/hour dirty, ~31$/hour after taxes. This is about the same as 5 thousand dollars a month. According to statistics, as of the 3rd quarter of 2017, this is 140% more than the third quartile for the Senior QA Automation Engineer position. The salary is high because I work directly, without outsourcing intermediary companies. As far as I know, Ciklum takes about 30% of the employee's income, which is paid by customers. For a tester, finding a remote location is very rare and lucky. In three months of searching, only one company responded to me. However, it is possible, especially if you search and work in parallel. I think that 18 levels of JavaRush (I completed that many) is quite enough even for Senior Automation QA. But only if you add to them the study of interview questions. Good luck and brave actions to everyone!
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