nodalpoint.org

I'm often drawn to websites like "Interview Questions for Tech Companies" (http://www.techinterviews.com/ ) as a perverse test of my accumulated knowledge. There is a short list of putative Google interview questions, but I question the validity of these listings, since every Google question I've seen referenced in the past seems way harder than what is posted there. Interestingly, there is a (lone) bioinformatics interview question posted (http://www.techinterviews.com/?s=bioinformatics ) but it falls very short of what I would use for an interview, as it seems more appropriate, as the article reads, as an SAT type question.

Which got me to thinking about bioinformatics interviewees. At a place I consult for they are currently hiring bioinformaticists, and I inevitably participate in the interview process. With what seems to be a deluge (still, and it's 2007... go figure...) of people trained in field X and coming into bioinformatics (it used to be that running a BLAST search qualified you as a bioinformaticist) there is a real opportunity to examine just what is and what qualifies one as a bioinformaticist. More interestingly to me would be to classify would-be bioinformaticists by the level of their involvement in computational biology, or the level at which they have operated (algorithm development, high-level analysis, etc...).

Because we as bioinformaticists are required to hold knowledge in a vast array of related topics such as mathematics, statistics and probability, programming languages, and oh yes biology and chemistry, overly pedantic questions in one subject area is not appropriate to differentiate potential candidates. What then are thought-provoking questions that yield insight into a candidate's experience dealing with analyzing biological data in novel ways? It might be nothing more than a thought exercise, and compiling a generalized list would serve no purpose since many positions focus on one area of bioinformatics (proteomics, microarrays, ...), but it may be helpful for those times where you've read all the papers from a candidate, the person seems like a good fit, and you have 10 minutes to kill before they go to the next person to interview.

So what of it Nodalpointers? Any good ideas for bioinformatics interview questions? I'd honestly like to hear what others think is generally important knowledge for someone to have to enter into a new basic or applied research or technology development bioinformatics team.

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Being a person that uses his own blog to talk a bit about everything, including but not limited to science related posts, I'm not so sure that it would be useful or not (I admit some guys from Affymetrix checked it because I criticized their software, and a few days later one of their representatives wanted to talk with me). It all depends on the topics that the blog deals with. Some may give an unfavorable bias to a prospective employer, because they may be unconventional, or just unexpected. That is why it doesn't show up on my resume, and that I'm very cautious of who I show it to when at work.

Personally I keep my resume in a separate section of my blog to be linked directly to, just in case.

Interesting to see how perceptions of blogging are changing in the science community :)