How would you deal with smarty pants SQA Engineer

This is a perfect QA manager interview question. Software quality assurance job market took a dramatic hit early this year, some signs of stabilization are appearing. A few recruiters believe layoffs have slowed. In the same time companies are not ready to begin hiring full-time testers, but many companies started to hire the contract workers to handle quality assurance projects that had been suspended last year. Hiring tester as contractor is always a big hurdle for QA manager, the proper answer on the dealing with smarty pants SQA Engineer would demonstrate management abilities.

There is the carrot and stick approach on resolving the work performance of tester, who instead of doing requested work tries to dig into the code and fix developers bugs in the application code. The carrot approach requires convincing QA Engineer to do something meaningful about the software application quality like discovering the weak point in application logic, set up testing environment for hard to test features, decide when the testing should be completed and finally sign off the production for production. QA Manager could also use the stick approach by asking QA Engineer serious questions about functionality of the new features, testing coverage, number of high severity bug logged, number of usefully executed test cases and when the application under test would be ready for production.