How to switch from Service based companies to top-tier product based companies?

This post is with respect to QA(testing) roles. So, experience, preparation methods and the skill set required will vary according to it.

If you have similar kind of questions or thought-process in your mind, go ahead this article is for you.

So, let me brief about my background role in the service based company before jumping into how I shifted my job. I started my career as a manual tester (yeah, the only trait I had in my mind was to think and test in a perspective of breaking the software).

Slowly, because of the monotonous job I was working on day-to-day basis, I decided to automate the task to reduce my effort in repetitive tasks. So, I started to learn licensed tools and the scripting language associated with it since there were tool-based restrictions in the project.

Later did I realise that tool-based scripting [Like UFT, where you use VBScript to automate scenarios] will not help me further, so I started to learn and refresh a programming language (According to me, it was Java because I lost touch since I did not get to work in it for initial time period in my company). In parallel, I was trying to apply the programming knowledge which I was gaining, in my application of the project I worked on.

Soon, Selenium (open-source tool) came in to the picture to solve my needs and I started developing interest on automating scenarios (simple as well as complex scenarios) in the web applications.

So, how did I get placed in a product company like Amazon as QAE?

I started to spend time more in coding and less in tool based scripting languages. In the sense, in product based companies, recruiters will look on how strong you are in programming language (you claim to know), how efficiently you are solving the given problem and also way of approach/steps you take to solve the problem.

I used to spend around 2–3 hours (1.5 hours each in the morning and evening during my weekdays) and 6–8 hours in weekend (I had a social life as well). I started to master the concepts of core Java (little bit, advanced concepts as well) and tried to apply whatever i learnt in the problems (GeeksforGeeks and Udemy) and started to improve gradually.

So, now you may wonder how my profile got shortlisted and what were the interview rounds and preparations for a QAE role, which I will be covering in my next article soon. 😄👍🏻

Since this is my first article, let me know if I have missed anything important to cover :)

P.S — This is purely my opinion and the experiences i have gone through. Ignore if not suitable. :)