The interview was very strange, the entire lab came to a conference room to interview me. Quite hostile, not very friendly, felt more like an exam. One of the least pleasant interview experiences I've had.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why do you want to work here rather than follow the standard path in academia?
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at DOE Joint Genome Institute (Berkeley, CA) in Jun 2022
Interview
Zoom interview with the boss.
He asked about everything possible, including things that you can not remember if you are not working with the tool oftenly, but since you know how to use the tool, you can search on the documentation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Which information can you infer from sam/bam files? How is the file?
Difference between fastq and fasta. How is the structure of these files.
rnaseq preprocessing steps
Show a machine learning code on your github
Which linux command do you use to transfer files from one server to another
How do you assembly a genome and question about long reads
Questions about metabolomics
Questions about aligners, parameters, types, how do they work
I applied online. The process took 7 months. I interviewed at DOE Joint Genome Institute in Jan 2022
Interview
One phone interview, followed by one take-home assignment, which was interesting. I liked the quality of assignment. Interview was taken by 10–12 team members. Everyone seemed lost. No one was interested in asking questions, only the hiring manager asked few questions. Some were rude but tried to act as if they cared about the whole process. It looked like they were just following the protocol with written questions. completely ghosted after the interview. Didn't even bother to reply to the followup e-mail, which is so unprofessional for a respectable organization. It's common that sometimes a candidate is not a good fit and that's absolutely ok, but what's not ok is ghosting the candidate and not acknowledging the follow-up e-mail, considering the fact that your hiring process was more than 7 months long.
My advice to the JGI hiring team- please be respectful of the candidates' time and skills. If a candidate has mentioned that they have a strong point in one area and is less experienced in another, frame your questions accordingly. It's better to get some training on how to hire people and ask good questions during the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
data engineering related like databases, data fetching, how to deal with space and time complexity.