Beckman Coulter Diagnostics Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I found the job online and then heard back about two weeks later from a recruiter. They did a quick twenty minute background interview where they asked about my education and work history, pretty basic stuff. After that, the recruiter set up a phone interview with the project manager. This one was more technical and also about fit, with simple questions about SQL and OOP. The next day, I got contacted and was told they wanted me to come in for a final interview. I said yes and they told me it would be a group interview with several candidates and hiring team members, so it would take a few days to schedule. They said I should hear back by Friday with a day and time. Since it was a Tuesday at the time, I figured I'd hear back soon. When I didn't hear anything on Friday, I assumed scheduling was just trickier than they thought. So, I emailed my recruiter on Monday. When she didn't reply by Wednesday, I called her and left a message. I also emailed the project manager (who had given me his email for any questions) asking about the schedule for the final interview. Unfortunately, neither of them ever got back to me, leaving me with no response.

So I had about three phone interviews first. Then they flew me out for an onsite. The onsite started pretty early at 8am and I had 5 interviews that were 45 minutes each. After that, I had lunch with some engineers. I was done and left around 1:15pm. They didn't do any whiteboard coding. It was more about basic C++ questions and digging into my past experience. They asked stuff like the difference between a struct and a class, what static does, and in C#, the difference between an interface and a class. Then they got into more detailed questions about how I built a COM server, how threads communicated, what they did, and what happened when they finished. They also asked how I'd approach writing a program for a specific problem and to share a good bug story. In total, including the phone and onsite parts, I probably spent about 9 hours talking with them. In the end, they told me they went with another candidate. I guess they had a lot of applicants, so only one can get the job.

It took 3 weeks to complete the hiring process for the devops Engineer position. There were 4 rounds in total: 2 technical interviews, a global discussion, and an HR round. The first round felt challenging, but the subsequent ones were easier. I was pleased with the offer and the overall process, including onboarding.