Worst process ever I faced.

Started in December 2015.

Initially, there was a telephonic round by the QA manager, and they asked me to fly down to Bangalore. I was interviewed by 5 people, and all went well. I was sent back saying they would come back as it was year-end and a long vacation period. I kept counting as I did my best in all rounds.

There was no callback, and I decided to move on.

Suddenly, after 4 months (April 2016), I received a call saying that I was not very well suited for the previously interviewed team and they did have an opening in another team. They confirmed me for further processes. This team was just looking for a full-time automation guy, not for protocol testing.

1. Team 1, who interviewed me in December 2015, concentrated fully on automation/programming skills and testing abilities, which I answered well. There were no questions on protocol, nor anything outside of automation/programming aspects, nothing at all.

2. But when I received the call in April 2016, I was told that Team 1 was/is looking for a protocol test engineer, and hence I was rejected. I conveyed to him that Team 1 didn't question me about anything apart from automation. He said he was not aware of all this and confirmed me for further discussions with Team 2.

3. Team 2, who interviewed me over Skype (2 rounds), questioned me much on the protocol side, which I clearly said I haven't worked on. They kept pushing me to correct my profile to remove those aspects since I had mentioned them. The second person, who seemed like a manager or something, was totally a jerk. He kept questioning me without giving me a chance to answer, and even if I answered, he didn't accept it. At the end, he just completed the interview in a pretty weird way.

Funny part is this HR, who called me in April 2016, stressed saying that in Sandisk, they won't reject any candidate and they keep trying to fill one or other position, and hence they re-tried to call me. Now I realize why they won't reject. They unnecessarily kill candidates' time by forwarding profiles to mismatch teams and say the candidate is not good.

First, get a clear picture of what you want and ask HRs to shortlist properly.

I wonder how they work together in Team 2. Pity those guys in the lateral team. Barbaric.

Team 1:

• How was automation achieved in your current company?
• What were the different challenges, and how did you overcome them?
• Daily challenges.
• A couple of problem-solving questions.
• Generic automation framework requirements.
• Best approach to deal with updating dev when a new bug arises (literally 25 minutes on this).
• Cross-platform.
• Jenkins.
• Design for the framework.
• Python problems.
• A few random programming questions.

Team 2:

• PCIe protocol.
• Various storage protocols.
• Why did you mention this and that in your resume?
• Have you prepared for the interview?
• SCSI protocol.
• What have you done in your previous company?
• What is project 1 and project x on my resume? (Stupid questionnaire.)