The best tester I ever worked with would have flunked your automation interview

The best tester I ever worked with would have flunked your automation interview.

She couldn't write a Selenium locator to save her life. What she could do was sit through a requirements review, go quiet for a minute, and then ask the one question that made the whole room realise the feature didn't actually make sense.

In 20 years I've met plenty of people who can automate a test. I've met very few who can tell you which test was worth automating in the first place.

Here's the heresy: most teams hire testers for the wrong skill. We screen for tooling syntax and call it competence. Jerry Weinberg worked this out fifty years ago — testing is fundamentally a human activity, and quality is "value to some person," not lines of code executed overnight. You cannot grep your way to that judgement.

Hiring a tester for their automation framework is like picking a London cabbie for the shine on their bonnet. Impressive, in its way. Entirely beside the point — the value was always The Knowledge.

So here's what I actually screen for now:

• Hand them a half-built feature and watch what they ask before they touch a keyboard.
• See whether they can raise a risk with a developer without it becoming a turf war.
• Ask about a bug they're proud of finding, and listen for curiosity rather than process.
• Check they can say "I don't think we should test that" and defend it. The good ones know where not to look.

Tooling you can teach a sharp person in a fortnight. The instinct for where the bodies are buried takes years, and no bootcamp sells it.

Automation gets you a tester who can check what you already thought of. Judgement gets you one who finds what you didn't — and only one of those keeps you off the Monday-morning incident call.

What did your best-ever tester do that the job spec never thought to ask for?