Pluspunten
* Small 11 person team. * Relationship-based culture. * Weekly Friday paid team lunches (these are obligatory btw) * They were open to hiring me despite me not having any C# or Azure DevOps background (for this I am very grateful!) * I was invited to my coworkers' homes for BBQ often. * They are open in discussing the company's finances and how business is doing. * If you enjoy working in an international environment, you will be pleased with the amount of Hebrew that is spoken every day. You may even pick up the language and learn a new culture. * The company is very gay-friendly and you can bring your pet to work.
Minpunten
* Despite the job title and the technical interviews, I would like to be clear: This is or will very quickly turn into a manual testing position. 90% of your work will be manually testing functionality any coding will be spent in debugging integration tests. For them, this is what SDET means. * This is not a start-up. The company has been around for more than 10 years. Please keep this in mind as you read further. * In general words like Agile, SDET, DevOps, Definition of Done, mean different things here. * During the interview process, instead of being asked to do a complicated SQL query, I was asked to name all the keywords in SQL I can remember. You will be asked to write a simple text parser for an anagram and asked how you can optimize any nested for-loop you may have. * During the interview process, the most important person will not be present. Basically the manual tester you will be working with for the majority of your time there. * The integration tests are not key-word driven, such as with FitNesse or RobotFramework (Management will not know what you are talking about if you bring this up). * They use the MS unit test framework exclusively for selenium integration testing. Important projects may have very few integration selenium tests and no or very little unit tests (They will be tested manually thoroughly). Important! While debugging tests, you will not be able to run tests on the nightly test server, and you can only look at logs and screenshots and try to reproduce locally. * Tests are not data-driven, test data is randomly produced every night. Something the team is very proud about and you will need to understand the inner workings of the random test data generator. * The management is only learning recently the importance of unit testing. To their defence, there is a strong culture of integration tests and manual testing. * There is no CI/CD process company-wide; the software is delivered when it has been manually tested. If you talk about CI/CD you will hear how it is a terrible idea or simply that it is not done at the company. * Prior to my joining, the team did not have a Wiki; all documentation were emails that were forwarded to you by the manual tester when asked to. * The month I joined, the team recently started learning about log aggregators. The team has historically spent much time searching for log files and reading them in text editors. * If you are familiar with the Page pattern for web testing, you may be interviewed on it by the Head of Automation (Isreal based via Skype), but it will be heavily discouraged by the NY team and by management. Sadly, tests are sloppy and frustrating to read. * If you are familiar with Kafka, you will be surprised to learn that important logging is written directly to database tables. If you talk to them about Kafka or writing to persistent logs they will not know what you are talking about. * All the development teams, except the NY one, is based in Isreal. This presents interesting challenges; Many (all?) timestamps are Isreali based. In Isreal, they do not work on Friday and will instead work on Sunday. Unfortunately, a problem that is discovered on Thursday in NY may take until Monday for a first response. * The team is not familiar with WireMock and if you mention it or know about it, it seems they will be impressed. ( But still not use it ) * The company's main form of communication is WhatsApp (despite having MS Teams). If an Isreali team does not respond via normal channels, you will be asked to check the WhatsApp group. * You will not see developers discussing architecture in whiteboarding sessions, nor heated discussions about design patterns. Clean whiteboards! Unused markers. * Important: if you are invited to interview in person it will be a Friday around midday. This is when the company has Friday lunches. It is very impressive though and the aim is to impress you. * If you decide to join, expect to haggle about the salary. They do not use recruiters. Any amount you mention may be counter-offered aggressively.
