I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Enzymatics
Interview
The only contact I had with the company was through a recruiter. I was asked by the recruiter to complete a programming problem, which I agreed to. I completed the problem and returned it to the recruiter. After that, I received a somewhat canned response from the recruiter indicating the company did not want to move forward with me. It's pretty lame of a company to not provide any feedback or work with me on the problem. When I asked for feedback, I was told I did not use any regular expressions. I did, in fact, use regular expressions, so I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at my code and just wasted my time.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Recursively find all FASTQ files in a directory and report each file name and the percent of sequences in that file that are greater than 30 nucleotides long
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Enzymatics in Aug 2014
Interview
There is a lot to suggest that this company is engaging in exploitative consultation as part of their interview process, mainly involving development of actual production code against their problem domain (extraction of gene sequences, etc, via Python) for free.
I received a recruitment letter containing a code-task which was very thorough and with a very precise deliverable. It's also important to note, that this was only the first step in the interview process. Additionally, the problem I see with what they wanted is as follows:
- It required a fairly convincing show of force, emphasizing "custom" code, essentially providing them with a tool-chain and library for free
- It was indirect and came through a recruiter, the firm of which I will graciously leave out
- The posted job description was incredibly awkward from a technical standpoint, if you get this posting and you know your stuff, you'll see what I'm talking about
- It was occupational specific to the extreme, I know this because I've interviewed for jobs at UTSW where this task was actually the main part of the job description. Anyone that works or has worked in their industry will recognize the task immediately as the equivalent of something that is typically out-sourced or done ad-hoc by scientists, or easily contracted out
- The posted salary (by the recruiter) was deceptively high, e.g. in 70k-90k realm, this was very disjoint with the task, and I had specifically mentioned in my resume that my objective was for an entry-level position, and I definitely could not justify such a salary in this case. And you know what they say about getting approached out of the blue, with things that sound too good to be true
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1) Recursively find all FASTQ files in a directory and report each file name and
the percent of sequences in that file that are greater than ..
2) Given a FASTA file with DNA sequences, find 10 most frequent sequences and
return the sequence and their counts in the file.0 nt long.
3) Given coordinates and a chromosome, write a program for looking up it's
annotation. Keep in mind you'll be doing this annotation millions of times.
And so on.