The interview was in three stages. 1) Video interview. You video tape your responses to questions. As many people have mentioned before, this method of interviewing is very cold. You never talk with anyone from the company at this point. There are some behavioral questions and also some technical questions. I prepared in advance and figured I did okay, because they moved forward with the process. 2) Phone interview. This is with HR. At this point I had not spoke with anyone from the team. Again, there were a lot of behavioral interview questions. 3) In person. I was extremely excited for this interview. I've admired Illumina for years. The group I interviewed with, however, was extremely aggressive. They wouldn't let me answer their questions before moving on to the next question. It was here that for the first time during an interview I figured I would not want to work with this group at all. At all. They had two openings for this position and at the end of the interview I understood why. I firmly believe that part of the interview is for you to see if you want to work with the group. If they can't keep it together for an interview, there's no hope of being successful together as a team. You have to love what you do.

In the technical round, I was asked to solve Java problems like star pattern printing, string manipulation, and logic-based tasks like checking even/odd numbers and parsing strings. One question was about accessing specific characters from the end of a string.