The interview was for a software engineer position dealing with test automation. I have 2 years' experience.

I had a negative experience interviewing with Illumina. I spoke with and exchanged emails with 2 recruiters/HR who were both super professional, friendly, and quick to get back to me. I had a quick phone interview with a manager who was also great, and it got me excited about the company.

It took about 2-3 weeks until they scheduled my next interview. They scheduled a technical interview as well as an interview with the team's manager for the next day which I thought was odd.

The technical interview went very poorly, both my fault and the interviewers'. One of the interviewers was brand new to the team (1 week) and was still learning. The more senior member seemed to not want to be doing the interview, and I could tell after a few questions they had basically stopped trying and were only killing time. It was honestly a bizarre experience that left me confused and frustrated. It was right after lunch and I think all 3 of us were just not fully in the right mindset for the situation.

Another thing I should mention is that the pay they were offering was significantly below the average, especially for SD.

The questions they asked me in both interviews were entirely based on definitions/topics you learn in early CS classes, as well as LeetCode questions. Nothing hands on or real-world.

Examples:

• What is overloading, what is a deadlock (first interview)
• Create a function that accepts an integer and returns an integer of the first integer's digits reverse, ex. 123 returns 321 (technical interview)