I’ve been working in black box QA for about 9 years. The past 6 have been at Apple. I have stalled out from a career standpoint and I want to transition into either an Automation role or a SDET role. I recently finished a CS degree from a CSU. I want to spend 2-3 hours a night ramping up so I can be ready to interview, but I do not have a good idea of where the bar is for either of these roles. Do I just need to LC grind? Should I focus on projects? Any feedback would be appreciated.
Automation tester here. Just go for it. Like Akamai said, you should practice writing tests with a well known test framework. You already have test methodology skills. Those are hard to learn. Writing test infrastructure code is harder than writing the tests, but not really expected of an entry level test developer. Test plans and test code need to be clear and readable, so generally you won't need fancy design patterns yet. Still study for a coding interview, because you will still get one.
Just learn Java or python. And start automating backend apis using testng/junit. In parallel to that try to automate day to day infrastructure related stuffs too. For that you can use python.
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Leetcode will help you get past phone screens and coding interviews. But you really need to figure out what kind of test automation you want to do. There's a big difference between front-end test automation and backend automation. You will need to familiarize yourself with the tools tailored to each of those. Will you want to develop tests for REST APIs using Java? Then you'll need to familiarize yourself with a set of tools like RestAssured and TestNG. In Python? Then you'll want to know how to use the request library along with a test development tool like Pytest or Robot. Will you be seeking a job doing test automation for GUIs? Then you'll need to learn Selenium. I have found it _very_ useful to know how to generate, serialize and deserialize test data. So, I'd suggest that you learn how to use libraries that manipulate/generate JSON (or XML, though this is less useful) data. In a lot of companies, you will not only be expected to write test plans and then automate the tests in them, you will also be expected to set up, configure and maintain all of the infrastructure needed to execute those test suites and report the results. So, knowing how to set up Docker containers and CI servers will be valuable skills.