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Happy Tuesday and welcome to our first #success-stories AMA with Drew Johnson, a Work With Indies community member who has recently accepted a position at Codemasters as their new QA Technician.

Drew joined us to share their experience finding, applying for and interviewing for their new role.

A little about Drew, in their own words:

"After graduating with a Master's in production, I was a little stuck at finding work until I was able to re-kindle my love of the games industry and decided to throw myself at trying to find work in an industry that I love."

Drew thank you for being here and taking the time to share your experience with the Work With Indies community!

Thank you for building such a welcoming and helpful community. I hope that I can answer any questions and provide some insight into my own experiences at least.

I've done a little research on game QA, but I just know what's on Wikipedia. My question is: What exactly do you do day-to-day? What is the hardest part of your job?

I will preface this by saying that things will be picking up proper just after the new year but I will give a reasonable answer from what information I do already have as well as from having peers already in QA roles.

Firstly, different studios might approach QA differently. Eg, you might have dedicated audio QAs, technical QAs, etc. or the studio might just have one QA team that does everything. Some QA roles are on contracts and others are permanent and full time.

In my case, I will be involved in a bit of everything. That could mean spending time trying to recreate bugs from others. Anything found being passed up the chain and written in whatever tracking software the studio uses (commonly Jira). From what I gather, certain issues can be a bit tedious as things need to be able to be replicated.

As for the hardest part, I will be in a better place to answer once I'm properly settled in to the role and have been there a wee while!

I'm looking for QA roles right now and I'm wondering about the ratio of applications to interviews that you had.

I believe it was around 6 QA specific job applications. Though I did receive feedback from a couple of other studios where they liked my CV/letter but were not able to carry on with my application due to relocating during the pandemic. Once everything has blown over then there may still be opportunities with those studios!

Hope you're feeling good! Could you tell us what were the steps for your application? Was there an assignment? What kind of questions were asked?

I'm doing good, thank you! Slightly taken by surprise how much interest there is in the AMA already so I'm frantically typing!

First step was to make sure my CV and cover letter were up to scratch. I always like to have a specific CV tailored towards a specific role and will always write a cover letter from scratch no matter how many job applications I've sent (you should see my old job applications folder on my PC...).