We once rejected a candidate whose entire pitch was “I find a lot of bugs.” Said with pride, like it was the qualification itself. It isn’t, and that’s why we passed.
Anyone can generate a long list
Give a reasonably careful person, or honestly most automated tools, enough time with a piece of software and they’ll come back with a long list of things technically wrong with it. Broken alignment on a rare viewport, an error message with the wrong grammar, a race condition that only shows up under load nobody expects in production. Volume of bugs found isn’t a meaningful signal of skill. It’s mostly a signal of time spent.
What separates a QA engineer worth hiring from one running a checklist is the next step: deciding which of those findings actually matter right now.
The harder skill is prioritization
Which bugs are genuinely release-blocking versus which are cosmetic. Which represent real user-facing risk versus an edge case almost nobody will hit. Which need fixing today versus which can sit in a backlog for a quarter. That’s judgment, and it’s rare in a way that raw bug-finding isn’t.
We talk about this internally as confidence per change, not tests per feature. The value we provide a team isn’t a raw count of test cases run or bugs logged. It’s a confident, prioritized answer to one question: is this specific change safe to ship. A long, unranked bug list doesn’t answer that question, it just hands the team a pile of anxiety. A short, well-judged set of findings that clearly separates “fix this now” from “this can wait, here’s why” gives them something they can actually act on.
What we actually look for when hiring
Not “how many bugs can you find in an hour.” We’d rather hear someone walk through five bugs and explain, credibly, why two of them are blockers and three aren’t, than watch them list fifty with no ranking at all.
That’s the difference between someone who tests software and someone who helps a team make a release decision. We hire for the second one.
If prioritized, decision-ready QA is what you’re looking for, that’s the model behind our testing services. And if you want a closer look at how we think through severity versus priority specifically, we wrote about it in more detail here.
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