I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Illumina (San Diego, CA) in Nov 2013
Interview
After an initial programming quiz and phone interview, I was brought in for an onsite interview. The interview was broken into 4 sections. First, bioinformatics scientists asked me questions, mostly about statistics. Then, 2 software engineers asked me about things like design patterns. Then, an HR representative told me about the company. Finally, the hiring manager asked me some programming questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked how to solve some statistics problems.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Illumina (San Diego, CA) in Aug 2018
Interview
I was contacted within a week of applying, and then received an email with a link to a video interview. The video interview was very awkward, as you only have one chance to record yourself answering a few questions that you only have a couple minutes to prepare for after seeing for the first time (it's not a live interview with someone, just you recording your answers to some preselected questions). However, the questions were fair and in some ways the experience is less stressful than a live interview. After the video questions, I was asked a few programming questions. These did not involve any video recording, of course; I was simply asked to write three programs that completed short tasks and produced specified input, given the ability to run the programs and check my answers. There was an emphasis on string manipulation. I had forty minutes to complete each program. No follow up interview but the process was very efficient and the senior recruiter I spoke to was kind and professional.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Define a race condition and two ways to prevent it.
Write a program that reads a string and prints how many times each letter appears in alphabetical order (omitting letters that don't appear). E.g., input "hello" will print "e1h1l2o1"
