I had a great experience with the NetApp people who work for NetApp/SolidFire. They were nice, friendly, and seemed extremely knowledgeable.

The first step was with their Technical Recruiter, which was easy and mainly based on my previous experience.

After that, I had a video call interview with the Head of Engineering and one of the Senior Engineers. This was a thorough session, asking about my background, how long I've been coding, and my personal strengths. It took 1 hour and 30 minutes, which was unusual.

I heard back from them for an in-person interview a couple of days after the video call.

The in-person interview was also a great experience. It took 4 hours and involved 8 different engineers. I knew they were team members from SolidFire.

• The first round was with Automation Engineers. They asked some testing and coding questions, which were fairly normal – neither hard nor easy.
• The second round was with Senior Engineers who have deep knowledge as developers. They mainly asked about coding questions, focusing on how I would design a class for a particular example, like a vending machine, and also asked Linux questions.
• The third and fourth rounds were more like chatting about QA questions, general role behavior, and expectations.

I did not receive an offer. The reason given was that my Linux experience/knowledge was not enough for NetApp/SolidFire. I think this was fair, as the company bases its systems heavily on Linux.

My recommendation for this particular position, if you apply for a Test Engineer in Development, is that you should have strong Linux and coding experience.

I personally enjoyed my time at NetApp; the people seemed very nice and helpful.

How would you write classes/methods for a vending machine?

How would you test a toaster?

Do you know how to copy a file from one server to another on Linux?