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How Firebase Interviewed Software Engineers

247 points by vikrum 7y ago

mayop100 7y ago
[author here] Hi all - I hope you find this useful! If you have questions or want to know more I’m hosting a live stream Q&A today on Twitter at 1 PM Pacific. Tune in and bring your interviewing and hiring questions! I'm @startupandrew on Twitter.
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  Was there ever a time the testing and quizzing was wrong? How did you know? For example, “Later that candidate did X, which would have been great for Firebase.” How often did you take subordinates that weren’t fresh college graduates or former/current FAANG engineers?
  - mayop100 7y ago
    Yes, we definitely had false negatives. It's always hard to be sure if you made a mistake though -- someone might be super successful at another company but not work out well at yours. I'm sure we made mistakes, though I don't have stats on this. We definitely hired non-new-grad non-FAANG engineers. In fact, new grads and FAANG alums were a minority for us.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      > someone might be super successful at another company but not work out well at yours I don't actually buy this. Environment makes a difference, sure, but if someone goes off and succeeds technically[1] at a another company in a big way they would have succeeded at yours as well. If that person can't succeed with you, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your organization. My experience, though, is that such organizations have much lower hiring bars. [1] I say "technically" because it's quite possible that the person is not very good technically, but landed at a place where that didn't matter and some combination of non-technical skills led to their success.
- jakebasile 7y ago
  Your claim that a take-home test is "lower stress" is undercut by the fact that you time your interviewees on their homework. Why do you think it is important to gauge how fast a person might be able to solve your toy problem, and why do you expect your candidates to dedicate 6-12 hours (unpaid) of continuous time to your company before you've even met them in person in most cases? Did you consider that this might inherently discriminate against those with significant time constraints in addition to their current job, biasing your results to new grads and people without hobbies and/or families?
  - mayop100 7y ago
    The alternative to a take-home test is on-site interviews with white board problems. These also take (unpaid) time and are timed (you have until the end of the interview). Doing this part of the interview at-home rather than in-person gives people more schedule flexibility, not less. The total time spent is higher than most interview processes I think, which can be a struggle for some folks. But I do think it's the right tradeoff. Regarding why time taken is an important data point -- we found a strong correlation between people who were able to get good solutions working quickly and people who were able to effectively defend their solutions during the "GoldMine review" in their on-site interview.
    - jakebasile 7y ago
      > The alternative to a take-home test is on-site interviews with white board problems. That's not the only alternative though. Why not use a more humane interview process involving conversation about previous work, ideas about the future, strengths and weaknesses? > The total time spent is higher than most interview processes I think, which can be a struggle for some folks. But I do think it's the right tradeoff. I don't agree but I'm glad you thought about it. I personally think making your interview process more inclusive allows you to get better candidates, as opposed to structuring the process in such a way to exclude those that have different priorities and life choices. > Regarding why time taken is an important data point -- we found a strong correlation between people who were able to get good solutions working quickly and people who were able to effectively defend their solutions during the "GoldMine review" in their on-site interview. Correlation doesn't equal causation though. I also want to point out that if you are expecting someone to "defend" themselves, that means you are on the offensive. Interviews don't need to be adversarial. Edit: I do want to put in one good thing I got from your article to offset my rather negative responses. You mention that even if you reject a candidate you gave them the full code review and feedback about why you rejected them. The culture of secrecy surrounding rejections is something that needs to die, and I'm glad that although I think your process as a whole is unfair, you took the step to change that toxic part of our industry's interview culture.
kamyarg 7y ago
> The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. ... only for the 1-2 top companies they are interviewing for. I have discontinued multiple interviews because they demanded 4-5 evenings of work for free on short notice, if I am going to spend 10-20 hours per company I have to take two weeks off from my current work to do it. On the other hand I have done the required work if I really want to join a company, but they are only top 5%. Another problem is, usually what is expected and how the project will be judged is not mentioned beforehand; - so do I write unit tests? - do you want docs for running it? - should it include deployment instructions/code? - does have to support 5000 req/s? - how important is clean code for this? each add more time and these kind of question are never ending. So unless you are Stripe, Airbnb, Netflix, etc. (Very strong Engineering and better than average culture), I will not bother, will say thank you and be on my way. Finally, let's say you have done the project and they reject you, they never put a fraction of the time you spent to give you feedback. because that means a lot of time they will spend on someone that will not be hired. Also might open the way for litigation for discrimination in some countries etc. On the other hand; Once I was managing hiring process of a new grad where we asked her to design a FE+BE system, after receiving it I spent a couple of hours reviewing it, we decided to hire her, she was very enthusiastic and smart, I also sent her our notes and how she can improve the project. Her response was along the lines of "even if you don't hire me I am very grateful for doing the project, did learn a lot" She joined and quickly became a very productive colleague. Edit: I noticed that the author mentions they keep in touch during the project and provide a code review, had not seen that yet while writing the comment. In that case it makes sense, but the candidate should know they will receive feedback even if they fail which I believe is hard for the team to accomplish but kudos if they did manage to do it.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Great story. Instead of looking as recruiting as a cost center, make it a marketing investment. Spend hours with someone, give them a good experience, make them an ambassador for your brand and an external sourcer for their friends and their future self. Use them as practice for your staff to get better as communicators, mentors, code reviewers.
elbrian 7y ago
I feel so fortunate that I have never been desperate enough to even entertain the idea of working for 8+ hours, for free, as part of an interview process. Yikes.
- davinic 7y ago
  I refuse to do so. The companies have no skin in the game and could easily be giving the same assignment to hundreds of people fighting for the job. I would entertain the idea later in the interview process, especially if there were some token payment to show that the potential employer is just as invested as I.
  - sjf 7y ago
    They are paying their engineers to conduct interviews, write feedback, and sit on hiring committees. The hiring process is hardly free for them either.
    - graphememes 7y ago
      On average it costs around 10-15k to hire an engineer.
      - itronitron 7y ago
        how much does it cost to interview an engineer?
        graphememes 7y ago
        > $2,000: the engineering team interviewed three candidates in-house before deciding to hire Jeanne. Each interview took about 7 hours (phone screens, in-house, debrief) for about 20 hours total. This is a rough estimate for the startup provided in this blog post, you can do this by taking the salaries, getting their assumed hourly rate, and then applying it to the amount spent interviewing. See https://blog.usejournal.com/it-costs-50k-to-hire-a-software-engineer-d06a0d051abf https://blog.usejournal.com/it-costs-50k-to-hire-a-software-...
brownkonas 7y ago
In a tight labor tech market , unnecessary friction in hiring will be detrimental until you build a brand (your company is hockey sticking or the day to day work has wide appeal to devs) or find the “true believers”. In a downturn , go crazy , set up your gauntlet , and you will find the best that your network or advertising can produce.
ttlei 7y ago
I checked out the Gold Mine problem on geeksforgeeks (assuming it is the same problem at firebase). Can you explain why it is "potentially impossible" to get the optimal solution?
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I took a quick look at it just now myself - it looks like it'd be pretty straightforward to solve by just brute-forcing every possible solution. Or is there some tortoise-hare type of "trick" I'm supposed to come up with?
  - joking 7y ago
    The firebase problem states that there is no optimal solution. so it can be as easy as increasing the size of the gold mine in a way that a brute force solution it's not posible and you must find sub optimal maximums applying heuristics. The travelling salesman problem has a lot of literature to understand this kinds of problems that are usually some variations of this problem originally stated near 200 years ago.
- mayop100 7y ago
  That's a different problem than the one we used. We added some additional complexity that required a search of the entire solution space to get a provably optimal answer, and then we made the maps & allowed # of moves large enough that brute force was impossible. So people had to build sub-optimal search solutions that pruned in intelligent ways.
  - ScottBurson 7y ago
    Did anyone use a SAT solver?
  - estomagordo 7y ago
    Is the problem (statement, input and hopefully leaderboard) available online somewhere? I figure it hasn't been used for recruiting in a long time, so there shouldn't be any downside of that nature to it being so. But there is the invested time in making it available, of course. I hardly think I would be the only one thriled to try it just for fun. It would probably provide a great deal of goodwill for you guys, as well as further the industry's understanding of what constitutes a good take-home problem.
jacobobryant 7y ago
"As a startup, process speed and transparency are your secret weapons when competing for candidates with large companies." Amen. I've known people who got through Google's interview process, but even then the response is "Great job, we'll let you know within a few months if there's an opening on a team you can join." Not a great response when you're graduating soon and you've got concrete offers from other companies that will expire.
Xenograph 7y ago
Could you elaborate on how you know "the amount of time a candidate took [on Goldmine] turned out to be a pretty strong signal."?
tlarkworthy 7y ago
I took that interview, and got the job, emigrated to the US from the UK and stayed for 4.5 years. I had total belief Firebase was the future and I wanted to be part of it. The challenge was mentally stimulating, harder than most academic planning problems. It was really hard to exploit the structure. I spent the full 9 hours on it after restarting my efforts at the 5 hour mark. 9 hours of sustained effort. Its not the kind of effort I would blow on most interviews, but totally worth it for that opportunity. And indeed, joining Firebase changed my life fundamentally. In retrospect.... it was such a great move, time spent exceedingly well :) Edit: I wonder how much was luck. I definitely aimed for Firebase. I used it once after seeing on HN and fell in love with it immediately. It felt like the future, so it wasn't dumb luck, but then, it worked out so very well, I wonder if I saw a similar opportunity I would be able to leap at it again. Would it work out again? I guess time will tell.
- koopuluri 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing. It's great to see how leaping at a seemingly small, fleeting opportunity based on seeing something once on HN had such a great impact on your life.
fishtoaster 7y ago
I've seen a lot of companies that, like firebase, try to assess if a candidate "is excited about our company" early in the process. It always seems weird to me. I barely know you- why would I be excited? Ask me at the end of the onsite after I've talked to a number of people across a variety of roles, seen your office, heard about the work, explored the culture, etc etc. During the initial screen, I really only know about your business, which is not the biggest factor for me.
- grimjack00 7y ago
  Everyone wants a candidate "excited about our company", but last time I interviewed after being laid off, so I was more "excited about a job". I didn't really get excited for my current job until about 3 months in, when I knew more about the internal workings of the team and the products, rather than what shows up on the public webpage.
- ses1984 7y ago
  The cynical side of me thinks that candidates are screened for this because screening for things like technical ability and communication skills is actually really hard, so we screen for this easy thing instead. I wonder if "excitedness about the company early in the interview process" is in any way indicative of on the job performance later on.
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    I find it's a lot easier to work for someone if I personally want their product; compared to a product that I have very little interest in.
- phlowbieuq 7y ago
  Firebase is probably a bit of an edge case on this one, because it was a paradigm-shifting developer product before dev products were cool. If you were a top-tier developer, there was a >0% chance that you would be super excited about the product because you realized the pain point that it would solve for you if you were building a real-time product at another company. And that excitement or lack thereof was a useful litmus test for Firebase specifically. I agree that "excited about our company" is not something you get up front if you are interviewing at a company that is building an on-demand AI marketplace for ML-optimized scooter rental office spaces.
hysan 7y ago
> Then, after they submitted their answer, we would provide them with a thorough and detailed code review (usually by the legendary @mikelehen). > We treated this code review like a real production code review, and we did it whether or not we planned to move forward with the candidate. First, thank you for actually investing time in giving feedback to candidates regardless of their performance. Second, did you tell candidates that they would get detailed feedback or a code review as part of the instructions or phone screen? If yes, I figure that this would greatly affect how willing people were to doing the assignment. I've always hated the thought of take home assignments because I have never been given detailed feedback and only rarely been given any feedback. Requests for feedback are always ignored regardless of performance. I sense that part of why people have greatly soured on take home assignments is because of how lopsided the time investment has become.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  If people knew they were going to get a free code review by a notorious developer, they might submit without any intention of taking the job. Having someone who knows there stuff look over your code and give you detailed pointers on what's good and bad, is like finding water in a desert for most devs.
  - nefitty 7y ago
    Any good resources you can recommend to improve my own code review skills? I'm keen on drilling into the most valuable skills needed in the industry right now. It sounds like good code review is super important but lacking.
    - ericmcer 7y ago
      It's really difficult to actually do a thorough check of logic , exploration of alternate approaches, performance concerns, etc. in all your code reviews, it would be an insane amount of time spent and probably no real return on investment for the company (obviously devs would love to spend a couple hours weighing the merits of different approaches to a problem). I have a list of checks to run through, some general (Sass variables used, reusable code/components used if possible, variables have meaningful names), others more specific to our codebase conventions. I add to the list as new conventions get prioritized and check it. Code review is more about maintaining codebase consistency than suggesting alternate solutions to problems for me.
ngneer 7y ago
I wonder if the OP can comment on whether GoldMine ended up biasing their decision to hire in an unintended way. In hiring security researchers, we have been finding that a lengthy technical exercise is terrific to properly gauge applicant skills, but that the scores of the test could end up weighing heavily on the decision to hire or not, potentially at the expense of unrealized potential. In other words, the candidate may have technical strengths not captured. I am assuming the approach only works to the extent that the test is a model of the actual problems the company is trying to solve. And yet they are looking for generalists. Somehow the test seems insufficient.
gwbas1c 7y ago
This article is worth reading just for the description about the take-home coding challenge. I agree that 4 hours is a good target, and that the coding challenge must be fun and in an language of the candidate's choice. > One common objection I’ve heard to take-home tests is that they are too time consuming, and candidates won’t be willing to do them. As a candidate, I encountered this situation twice, but it was because the coding challenge was poorly designed. In one case, the coding challenge basically required me to learn two major Java frameworks. As I had minimal Java experience and never touched the frameworks, I estimated that it would take me 2-3 days just to understand what someone else could probably do in 2-3 hours. I have no desire to be a framework jock, so I walked away. Another time, I did a challenge for an open-source company. They had a list of some bugs, and I picked what I thought was easiest. The language wasn't one that I did any work in. No one responded to my questions, so again, I walked away.
alephnan 7y ago
> If the candidate is traveling for the interview, your company should pay for all travel expenses and make sure they have a reasonable schedule and are able to get a full night’s sleep the night before. We're lucky to have this in the software industry as standard practice. Has anyone had horror stories otherwise?
jlev 7y ago
I'm currently on the job market, and have done a few of these types of take-home tests over the last two months. If they're well structured, as it appears here, they can be fun and hopefully build enthusiasm about the company. If they're not, it's a huge red flag. A company that doesn't value my time as a candidate is unlikely to do so as an employee, and isn't one I want to work with. If you do this, make sure to treat candidates with respect and humanity. Give them some feedback at the end of the process, so they know their efforts aren't wasted.
codingdave 7y ago
> I don’t believe we ever lost a candidate due to them not being willing to take our test. The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. This is the part that didn't ring true, at least for me. I believe that there are some candidates would not complain. But if I am good engineer, odds are that I already have a job that works well for me. Maybe not the perfect job, but working well enough that you'll have to give more incentive than just a job being available before I'd spend a day on a take-home, unpaid project. So according to the quote above, I'm not the strongest candidate because I'm not willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. Maybe from the hiring manager's point of view, that is even true. But I've already landed the right job. I work there, every day. If you want to poach folk like me from a job that is already right, 6 hour take-home tests aren't the answer. Give us something quicker. Maybe not easier... I believe a challenging interview process is fair. But quicker.
- twic 7y ago
  How would you give an interview that is challenging, fair, and quick?
  - bigdubs 7y ago
    Do a bunch of algorithm whiteboard interviews with a super huge false negative rate.
  - forgot-my-pw 7y ago
    Had one company paid me for my time developing their test interview app. That was the first and only experience I had. Took a day to do, but I made sure it was really polished.
    - notyourwork 7y ago
      You should highlight them by name, more companies should do this.
    - rsyring 7y ago
privateSFacct 7y ago
This overlaps a bit with RFP processes. If you get a request for a proposal where the potential customer / hiring committee clearly just copy/pasted a set of items that don't even fit their company type or area, or that ask for unreasonable stuff from the start, then you will save yourself a TON of time by saying thanks but no thanks. If someone has an interesting set of question or a clean and focused RFP, fantastic. GO for it, you will enjoy working with them. Another item - if your customer will need to do some type of work, have a TINY bit of that in your engagement process. Ie, let's say client will need to write a lot of text, have them briefly respond to a question in the process. If they will need to fill out worksheets, have them do a tiny one. Another one - if they won't tell you what they need or who they are - not worth it.
swyx 7y ago
what kind of dev responds to the “what happens when you type google.com into the browser” question with “Well, most laptops have mechanical butterfly mechanism in their keyboards…”??
- dmurray 7y ago
  Right? Most browsers these days are run on mobile devices with capacitative touchscreens for input.
- polynomial 7y ago
  The kind you want to hire.
- siphor 7y ago
  its a well known question, probably someone who has previously thought about it
lbatx 7y ago
At a previous company, we too would administer a technical test. Our pass rate was close to what was described in the article (40% for ours vs 25%). However, our test was incredibly simple. At most, it should have take a competent developer two hours to complete [including writing comments and a README]. The assignment was to read a file containing a list of numbers (some formatted incorrectly, so there was some very simple parsing logic involved), call an API using each correctly formatted number as a parameter, and store what the API returned to a file. I am to this day stunned that 60% of people who passed a phone screen could not solve this task. Note that we gave them the input file, so it wasn't a matter of an edge case tripping them up or them getting one input file but the test input file having some other edge case. My point here is that it may be possible to get the same screening value with much less investment from the candidate.
- matwood 7y ago
  We also did similar take homes that at most should take an hour or two if someone really went overboard. I was amazed at what was returned. It wouldn’t compile or the candidate didn’t follow simple directions. I called it our version of a take home fizz buzz.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  The ROI is probably low on the LeetCode hard questions. Most people that can solve LeetCode easy, plus have some sense of Design Patterns (so you know they can think big picture too)-- and you've got yourself a good candidate.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  We’re the other numbers in your funnel similar as well (phone screen pass, on-site pass, offer accepted)? I ask this because the numbers I saw in the article look remarkably similar to approximate numbers I’ve seen or been told about other companies.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    *were
  - 7y ago
mherdeg 7y ago
> One of my favorite interview questions (created by Vikrum) was: “What happens after you type ‘https://www.google.com’ https://www.google.xn--com-to0a into a browser and hit enter?” Wow, I had no idea who came up with that question first. (see, e.g., https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when ). When was the first time it was asked? Where?
TheChaplain 7y ago
A "take home test" of 6 hours is a waste of my time. I'd rather spend those hours on a personal project which I can use for demonstrating to potential employers or perhaps use for a side-income.
gymnast35 7y ago
I interviewed with Andrew in Google for an internal team transfer as a Software Engineer. At the end of a very strange non-technical 30-minute interview where he sounded like an important and arrogant upper-management, I asked him what he was looking for and his reply was he wanted to hire someone that he liked and wanted to work with. That's seriously what it boils down to. I cannot take this article seriously. And "a history of working on challenging projects with real deliverables" sounds ridiculous, when you know they hired people straight from bootcamps as engineers.
- mayop100 7y ago
  I’m sorry you feel I was arrogant. I really do want to hire people “that I like and wanted to work with” though. I would hope most managers do. FWIW we never technically interviewed internal transfers inside Google (we counted on Google’s normal interview process to maintain the bar). We were just looking for team fit in those discussions. I’m disappointed you would belittle bootcamp graduates. Many of them are awesome, and we were lucky enough to hire one amazing one. And yes he did have a “history of working on challenging problems with real deliverables”, just not the CS kind in this case.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
DigitalSea 7y ago
>The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. Yeah, maybe if they're interviewing to work for Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft or other big-ticket dream companies a lot of developers want to work for. But, Andrew was talking about hiring for an early-stage startup, before Google even acquired them. As a startup, you're asking others to take a risk by working for you. Some engineers have families, debts and commitments to worry about. Working for an early-stage startup that might run out of money or collapse is a very real and likely risk. It's hard to argue that Firebase was not a roaring success for Andrew and others. But, expecting a candidate to do a six-hour test for a startup that statistically might not have succeeded, and furthermore, listing out the benefits of a take-home test being less stressful and then proceeding to describe what sounds like micromanagement under the guise of helping (by calling candidates at the start and during of the technical test). And we keep hearing there is a talented engineer shortage. Maybe the problem isn't a shortage, it's companies expecting engineers to be put through arduous and time-consuming interview processes like they're trying to get a job at NASA building human-payload rockets. For every company wanting to take hours and days of your time, there is another company that won't put you through a BS hiring process and make it faster. I work for a smaller company, I had two interviews for a front-end engineering position. I came in, met with the engineering lead and another senior. They didn't make me do a technical test, they opened up my GitHub profile on a large monitor, handed me a keyboard and mouse and asked me to pick one of my repositories and run them through my code and decisions that I had made. I chose a Javascript library I had built, they asked me things about the architecture, if I had tests, my thoughts on Webpack and other bundlers. It was all related to the library and all answers I could easily provide because I built it. No BS, just a pressure-free interview. The second and final interview was a coffee with the general manager and the engineering lead. They gave me more detail about why they're looking for someone, explained it was a new position and where they saw me fitting. I ended up having lunch with them and a couple of other team members who joined. It was all casual and pressure free. This company offered me $50k more than I was currently earning. It was a MASSIVE pay bump for me, and I didn't have to sacrifice hours of my family time just to be told I didn't pass or get the job. It's also a completely remote position, no commute whatsoever. No wonder this company has been around thirty years and many of the original hires are still here.
anthonybsd 7y ago
>The whole test was designed to take 6 hours. Pre-Screening to get to an onsite interview taking 6 hours? I'm sorry, but this is the exact toxic interview culture that is poisoning the job hiring process in tech startups. >Some of our employees enjoyed the test so much, in fact, that they continued working on their solutions after they were hired Jee, I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that they were, you know, new employees? As in, trying to put their best side forward and make a great impression? Did it even occur to you that you are inadvertently increasing their workload with your downright torturous screening process?
shubidubi 7y ago
2 issues i have with this "process": 1 - take-home task of "only" 6 hours. that's on top of the onsite (~6 hours) and a few hours for phone call and followups. that's too much for an unpaid job. 2 - they try to find people they know to sniff around about the candidate. that's usually bad as you can jeopardize the candidate's current job (usually people interview while still working at another place). overall this post made me want to work at firebase even less now.
01100011 7y ago
Take home tests are fine by me, but before you ask me to do that you better have sold me on the job first. If I really want the job, no problem. I expect, however, that spending 6 hours of my weekend on unpaid labor translates into a shorter on-site if you like the quality of my work. The goal of the on-site should be to verify that I was actually the person who did the work for the take-home. Things are a bit different when I'm some schmuck off the street begging for work. If you're trying to build a team and you want my skills, well, in this market I'm not putting a lot of energy into it. Case in point, I've had a company trying to hire me for over a year now. They're in consumer electronics and it is a fickle market so I kept turning them down, but I had a bad week at work and figured I'd go for it. I'd be an absolute perfect fit given my experience and what they're looking for, so it seemed like things were going to work out great. I accept an on-site, do well on a whiteboard coding test and a general review of my resume, and then one of their senior folks throws me an off-the-wall algorithm question(random sample a stream of data with uniform probability). Now, I'm an embedded guy, with an EE degree, and I specialize in "software engineering". They have many problems I'm perfectly suited to solving. They really, really need a guy like me(to design and fix drivers, abstraction layers, facilitate porting to new devices and enable third party clients). But here's this guy, asking me an algorithm question, and he didn't even explain it right. I googled the answer(reservoir sampling) when I was finished and understood the solution in a couple minutes, but it was too late. I was flagged for 2 more algorithm-heavy, 'cracking the coding' interviews the following Monday. I really didn't feel like spending my weekend reviewing bullshit I never use in my job, so I turned down the offer. It's too bad, I was a good fit for the team, and I was a great fit for the problems they were trying to solve.
nitwit005 7y ago
While it's certainly convenient to give everyone the same question, you'll find that questions asked by even smaller companies get posted online these days. You then give everyone willing to cheat an edge.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Candidates can cheat take-home exams by asking someone else to complete the assignment. After the assignment, you have to ask detailed questions about the code, solution approach and trade-offs. If what you have to offer is above average (compensation, growth opportunities, reputation, culture) people will be willing to make an extra effort. If you are offering the same as everyone else, candidates will deprioritize your interviews.
aryehof 7y ago
Smart, compliant, friendly and enthuastic. No problem domain, life or business experience required. Sounds neat until one realizes you can be replaced in an instant by one of the ever growing number of new "graduates" every year.
meuk 7y ago
Not a place I'd want to work, I think. Two red flags are: 1. They signal from the first point that all your time belongs to the company. Taking a test of 6 hours is not something I'd have time for. 2. Their company value "Give 110%, 33% of the Time" creeps me out. If someone is not satisfied when you give 100%, run away.
nurettin 7y ago
Really appreciate all the skills and positive attitude they were looking for and I think every engineer should strive to live up to their standards up until this part: …is excited about our company. Excitement should be deserved, which means it is a feeling which is acquired after working together for some time. It should not be required as the default position in a job interview. To build a great product, you need seasoned professionals, not gullible hipsters.
hising 7y ago
"we had a small team of just 24 exceptional people that I firmly believe was among the strongest of its kind in the world" I am absolutely sure that this is something A LOT of companies say and think about their current setup. Impossible to verify, just something that sounds great and makes the 24-people group feel special.
chank 7y ago
This is probably survivorship bias at work. A lot of startups have strong sense of self worth because they believe they are hiring/have the best candidates with their process. Let's be realistic, you can probably build a really good team out of just about any sampling of 1000 applicants with just a regular couple-hour interview process.
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Optim 7y ago
(rant) Startup idea: take away home assignments for a fee. You send us your code assignment we make it for you. We also provide you with code highlights so you can understand the code and architecture faster and have something to talk about on the onsite. Most of the work is not done by us but by "volunteers" . Who are these "volunteers" ? Desperate engineers looking for a role, who are thinking that our fake company is really wanting to hire them. We also get in touch with hiring managers and convince them to send take away assignments in order to increase our market. (/rant) I don't like code assignments because they can easily be abused by both companies and candidates and regardless of my opinion on it I think Firebase is awesome. I was an early adopter before you got adquired by Google.

247 points by vikrum 7y ago

[author here] Hi all - I hope you find this useful! If you have questions or want to know more I’m hosting a live stream Q&A today on Twitter at 1 PM Pacific. Tune in and bring your interviewing and hiring questions! I'm @startupandrew on Twitter.

doctorpangloss 7y ago
Was there ever a time the testing and quizzing was wrong? How did you know? For example, “Later that candidate did X, which would have been great for Firebase.” How often did you take subordinates that weren’t fresh college graduates or former/current FAANG engineers?
- mayop100 7y ago
  Yes, we definitely had false negatives. It's always hard to be sure if you made a mistake though -- someone might be super successful at another company but not work out well at yours. I'm sure we made mistakes, though I don't have stats on this. We definitely hired non-new-grad non-FAANG engineers. In fact, new grads and FAANG alums were a minority for us.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > someone might be super successful at another company but not work out well at yours I don't actually buy this. Environment makes a difference, sure, but if someone goes off and succeeds technically[1] at a another company in a big way they would have succeeded at yours as well. If that person can't succeed with you, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your organization. My experience, though, is that such organizations have much lower hiring bars. [1] I say "technically" because it's quite possible that the person is not very good technically, but landed at a place where that didn't matter and some combination of non-technical skills led to their success.
jakebasile 7y ago
Your claim that a take-home test is "lower stress" is undercut by the fact that you time your interviewees on their homework. Why do you think it is important to gauge how fast a person might be able to solve your toy problem, and why do you expect your candidates to dedicate 6-12 hours (unpaid) of continuous time to your company before you've even met them in person in most cases? Did you consider that this might inherently discriminate against those with significant time constraints in addition to their current job, biasing your results to new grads and people without hobbies and/or families?
- mayop100 7y ago
  The alternative to a take-home test is on-site interviews with white board problems. These also take (unpaid) time and are timed (you have until the end of the interview). Doing this part of the interview at-home rather than in-person gives people more schedule flexibility, not less. The total time spent is higher than most interview processes I think, which can be a struggle for some folks. But I do think it's the right tradeoff. Regarding why time taken is an important data point -- we found a strong correlation between people who were able to get good solutions working quickly and people who were able to effectively defend their solutions during the "GoldMine review" in their on-site interview.
  - jakebasile 7y ago
    > The alternative to a take-home test is on-site interviews with white board problems. That's not the only alternative though. Why not use a more humane interview process involving conversation about previous work, ideas about the future, strengths and weaknesses? > The total time spent is higher than most interview processes I think, which can be a struggle for some folks. But I do think it's the right tradeoff. I don't agree but I'm glad you thought about it. I personally think making your interview process more inclusive allows you to get better candidates, as opposed to structuring the process in such a way to exclude those that have different priorities and life choices. > Regarding why time taken is an important data point -- we found a strong correlation between people who were able to get good solutions working quickly and people who were able to effectively defend their solutions during the "GoldMine review" in their on-site interview. Correlation doesn't equal causation though. I also want to point out that if you are expecting someone to "defend" themselves, that means you are on the offensive. Interviews don't need to be adversarial. Edit: I do want to put in one good thing I got from your article to offset my rather negative responses. You mention that even if you reject a candidate you gave them the full code review and feedback about why you rejected them. The culture of secrecy surrounding rejections is something that needs to die, and I'm glad that although I think your process as a whole is unfair, you took the step to change that toxic part of our industry's interview culture.

kamyarg 7y ago

> The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. ... only for the 1-2 top companies they are interviewing for. I have discontinued multiple interviews because they demanded 4-5 evenings of work for free on short notice, if I am going to spend 10-20 hours per company I have to take two weeks off from my current work to do it. On the other hand I have done the required work if I really want to join a company, but they are only top 5%. Another problem is, usually what is expected and how the project will be judged is not mentioned beforehand; - so do I write unit tests? - do you want docs for running it? - should it include deployment instructions/code? - does have to support 5000 req/s? - how important is clean code for this? each add more time and these kind of question are never ending. So unless you are Stripe, Airbnb, Netflix, etc. (Very strong Engineering and better than average culture), I will not bother, will say thank you and be on my way. Finally, let's say you have done the project and they reject you, they never put a fraction of the time you spent to give you feedback. because that means a lot of time they will spend on someone that will not be hired. Also might open the way for litigation for discrimination in some countries etc. On the other hand; Once I was managing hiring process of a new grad where we asked her to design a FE+BE system, after receiving it I spent a couple of hours reviewing it, we decided to hire her, she was very enthusiastic and smart, I also sent her our notes and how she can improve the project. Her response was along the lines of "even if you don't hire me I am very grateful for doing the project, did learn a lot" She joined and quickly became a very productive colleague. Edit: I noticed that the author mentions they keep in touch during the project and provide a code review, had not seen that yet while writing the comment. In that case it makes sense, but the candidate should know they will receive feedback even if they fail which I believe is hard for the team to accomplish but kudos if they did manage to do it.

lonelappde 7y ago
Great story. Instead of looking as recruiting as a cost center, make it a marketing investment. Spend hours with someone, give them a good experience, make them an ambassador for your brand and an external sourcer for their friends and their future self. Use them as practice for your staff to get better as communicators, mentors, code reviewers.

elbrian 7y ago

I feel so fortunate that I have never been desperate enough to even entertain the idea of working for 8+ hours, for free, as part of an interview process. Yikes.

davinic 7y ago
I refuse to do so. The companies have no skin in the game and could easily be giving the same assignment to hundreds of people fighting for the job. I would entertain the idea later in the interview process, especially if there were some token payment to show that the potential employer is just as invested as I.
- sjf 7y ago
  They are paying their engineers to conduct interviews, write feedback, and sit on hiring committees. The hiring process is hardly free for them either.
  - graphememes 7y ago
    On average it costs around 10-15k to hire an engineer.
    - itronitron 7y ago
      how much does it cost to interview an engineer?
      - graphememes 7y ago
        > $2,000: the engineering team interviewed three candidates in-house before deciding to hire Jeanne. Each interview took about 7 hours (phone screens, in-house, debrief) for about 20 hours total. This is a rough estimate for the startup provided in this blog post, you can do this by taking the salaries, getting their assumed hourly rate, and then applying it to the amount spent interviewing. See https://blog.usejournal.com/it-costs-50k-to-hire-a-software-engineer-d06a0d051abf https://blog.usejournal.com/it-costs-50k-to-hire-a-software-...

brownkonas 7y ago

In a tight labor tech market , unnecessary friction in hiring will be detrimental until you build a brand (your company is hockey sticking or the day to day work has wide appeal to devs) or find the “true believers”. In a downturn , go crazy , set up your gauntlet , and you will find the best that your network or advertising can produce.

ttlei 7y ago

I checked out the Gold Mine problem on geeksforgeeks (assuming it is the same problem at firebase). Can you explain why it is "potentially impossible" to get the optimal solution?

commandlinefan 7y ago
I took a quick look at it just now myself - it looks like it'd be pretty straightforward to solve by just brute-forcing every possible solution. Or is there some tortoise-hare type of "trick" I'm supposed to come up with?
- joking 7y ago
  The firebase problem states that there is no optimal solution. so it can be as easy as increasing the size of the gold mine in a way that a brute force solution it's not posible and you must find sub optimal maximums applying heuristics. The travelling salesman problem has a lot of literature to understand this kinds of problems that are usually some variations of this problem originally stated near 200 years ago.
mayop100 7y ago
That's a different problem than the one we used. We added some additional complexity that required a search of the entire solution space to get a provably optimal answer, and then we made the maps & allowed # of moves large enough that brute force was impossible. So people had to build sub-optimal search solutions that pruned in intelligent ways.
- ScottBurson 7y ago
  Did anyone use a SAT solver?
- estomagordo 7y ago
  Is the problem (statement, input and hopefully leaderboard) available online somewhere? I figure it hasn't been used for recruiting in a long time, so there shouldn't be any downside of that nature to it being so. But there is the invested time in making it available, of course. I hardly think I would be the only one thriled to try it just for fun. It would probably provide a great deal of goodwill for you guys, as well as further the industry's understanding of what constitutes a good take-home problem.

jacobobryant 7y ago

"As a startup, process speed and transparency are your secret weapons when competing for candidates with large companies." Amen. I've known people who got through Google's interview process, but even then the response is "Great job, we'll let you know within a few months if there's an opening on a team you can join." Not a great response when you're graduating soon and you've got concrete offers from other companies that will expire.

Xenograph 7y ago

Could you elaborate on how you know "the amount of time a candidate took [on Goldmine] turned out to be a pretty strong signal."?

tlarkworthy 7y ago

I took that interview, and got the job, emigrated to the US from the UK and stayed for 4.5 years. I had total belief Firebase was the future and I wanted to be part of it. The challenge was mentally stimulating, harder than most academic planning problems. It was really hard to exploit the structure. I spent the full 9 hours on it after restarting my efforts at the 5 hour mark. 9 hours of sustained effort. Its not the kind of effort I would blow on most interviews, but totally worth it for that opportunity. And indeed, joining Firebase changed my life fundamentally. In retrospect.... it was such a great move, time spent exceedingly well :) Edit: I wonder how much was luck. I definitely aimed for Firebase. I used it once after seeing on HN and fell in love with it immediately. It felt like the future, so it wasn't dumb luck, but then, it worked out so very well, I wonder if I saw a similar opportunity I would be able to leap at it again. Would it work out again? I guess time will tell.

koopuluri 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. It's great to see how leaping at a seemingly small, fleeting opportunity based on seeing something once on HN had such a great impact on your life.

fishtoaster 7y ago

I've seen a lot of companies that, like firebase, try to assess if a candidate "is excited about our company" early in the process. It always seems weird to me. I barely know you- why would I be excited? Ask me at the end of the onsite after I've talked to a number of people across a variety of roles, seen your office, heard about the work, explored the culture, etc etc. During the initial screen, I really only know about your business, which is not the biggest factor for me.

grimjack00 7y ago
Everyone wants a candidate "excited about our company", but last time I interviewed after being laid off, so I was more "excited about a job". I didn't really get excited for my current job until about 3 months in, when I knew more about the internal workings of the team and the products, rather than what shows up on the public webpage.
ses1984 7y ago
The cynical side of me thinks that candidates are screened for this because screening for things like technical ability and communication skills is actually really hard, so we screen for this easy thing instead. I wonder if "excitedness about the company early in the interview process" is in any way indicative of on the job performance later on.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  I find it's a lot easier to work for someone if I personally want their product; compared to a product that I have very little interest in.
phlowbieuq 7y ago
Firebase is probably a bit of an edge case on this one, because it was a paradigm-shifting developer product before dev products were cool. If you were a top-tier developer, there was a >0% chance that you would be super excited about the product because you realized the pain point that it would solve for you if you were building a real-time product at another company. And that excitement or lack thereof was a useful litmus test for Firebase specifically. I agree that "excited about our company" is not something you get up front if you are interviewing at a company that is building an on-demand AI marketplace for ML-optimized scooter rental office spaces.

hysan 7y ago

> Then, after they submitted their answer, we would provide them with a thorough and detailed code review (usually by the legendary @mikelehen). > We treated this code review like a real production code review, and we did it whether or not we planned to move forward with the candidate. First, thank you for actually investing time in giving feedback to candidates regardless of their performance. Second, did you tell candidates that they would get detailed feedback or a code review as part of the instructions or phone screen? If yes, I figure that this would greatly affect how willing people were to doing the assignment. I've always hated the thought of take home assignments because I have never been given detailed feedback and only rarely been given any feedback. Requests for feedback are always ignored regardless of performance. I sense that part of why people have greatly soured on take home assignments is because of how lopsided the time investment has become.

merpnderp 7y ago
If people knew they were going to get a free code review by a notorious developer, they might submit without any intention of taking the job. Having someone who knows there stuff look over your code and give you detailed pointers on what's good and bad, is like finding water in a desert for most devs.
- nefitty 7y ago
  Any good resources you can recommend to improve my own code review skills? I'm keen on drilling into the most valuable skills needed in the industry right now. It sounds like good code review is super important but lacking.
  - ericmcer 7y ago
    It's really difficult to actually do a thorough check of logic , exploration of alternate approaches, performance concerns, etc. in all your code reviews, it would be an insane amount of time spent and probably no real return on investment for the company (obviously devs would love to spend a couple hours weighing the merits of different approaches to a problem). I have a list of checks to run through, some general (Sass variables used, reusable code/components used if possible, variables have meaningful names), others more specific to our codebase conventions. I add to the list as new conventions get prioritized and check it. Code review is more about maintaining codebase consistency than suggesting alternate solutions to problems for me.

ngneer 7y ago

I wonder if the OP can comment on whether GoldMine ended up biasing their decision to hire in an unintended way. In hiring security researchers, we have been finding that a lengthy technical exercise is terrific to properly gauge applicant skills, but that the scores of the test could end up weighing heavily on the decision to hire or not, potentially at the expense of unrealized potential. In other words, the candidate may have technical strengths not captured. I am assuming the approach only works to the extent that the test is a model of the actual problems the company is trying to solve. And yet they are looking for generalists. Somehow the test seems insufficient.

gwbas1c 7y ago

This article is worth reading just for the description about the take-home coding challenge. I agree that 4 hours is a good target, and that the coding challenge must be fun and in an language of the candidate's choice. > One common objection I’ve heard to take-home tests is that they are too time consuming, and candidates won’t be willing to do them. As a candidate, I encountered this situation twice, but it was because the coding challenge was poorly designed. In one case, the coding challenge basically required me to learn two major Java frameworks. As I had minimal Java experience and never touched the frameworks, I estimated that it would take me 2-3 days just to understand what someone else could probably do in 2-3 hours. I have no desire to be a framework jock, so I walked away. Another time, I did a challenge for an open-source company. They had a list of some bugs, and I picked what I thought was easiest. The language wasn't one that I did any work in. No one responded to my questions, so again, I walked away.

alephnan 7y ago

> If the candidate is traveling for the interview, your company should pay for all travel expenses and make sure they have a reasonable schedule and are able to get a full night’s sleep the night before. We're lucky to have this in the software industry as standard practice. Has anyone had horror stories otherwise?

jlev 7y ago

I'm currently on the job market, and have done a few of these types of take-home tests over the last two months. If they're well structured, as it appears here, they can be fun and hopefully build enthusiasm about the company. If they're not, it's a huge red flag. A company that doesn't value my time as a candidate is unlikely to do so as an employee, and isn't one I want to work with. If you do this, make sure to treat candidates with respect and humanity. Give them some feedback at the end of the process, so they know their efforts aren't wasted.

codingdave 7y ago

> I don’t believe we ever lost a candidate due to them not being willing to take our test. The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. This is the part that didn't ring true, at least for me. I believe that there are some candidates would not complain. But if I am good engineer, odds are that I already have a job that works well for me. Maybe not the perfect job, but working well enough that you'll have to give more incentive than just a job being available before I'd spend a day on a take-home, unpaid project. So according to the quote above, I'm not the strongest candidate because I'm not willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. Maybe from the hiring manager's point of view, that is even true. But I've already landed the right job. I work there, every day. If you want to poach folk like me from a job that is already right, 6 hour take-home tests aren't the answer. Give us something quicker. Maybe not easier... I believe a challenging interview process is fair. But quicker.

twic 7y ago
How would you give an interview that is challenging, fair, and quick?
- bigdubs 7y ago
  Do a bunch of algorithm whiteboard interviews with a super huge false negative rate.
- forgot-my-pw 7y ago
  Had one company paid me for my time developing their test interview app. That was the first and only experience I had. Took a day to do, but I made sure it was really polished.
  - notyourwork 7y ago
    You should highlight them by name, more companies should do this.
  - rsyring 7y ago

privateSFacct 7y ago

This overlaps a bit with RFP processes. If you get a request for a proposal where the potential customer / hiring committee clearly just copy/pasted a set of items that don't even fit their company type or area, or that ask for unreasonable stuff from the start, then you will save yourself a TON of time by saying thanks but no thanks. If someone has an interesting set of question or a clean and focused RFP, fantastic. GO for it, you will enjoy working with them. Another item - if your customer will need to do some type of work, have a TINY bit of that in your engagement process. Ie, let's say client will need to write a lot of text, have them briefly respond to a question in the process. If they will need to fill out worksheets, have them do a tiny one. Another one - if they won't tell you what they need or who they are - not worth it.

swyx 7y ago

what kind of dev responds to the “what happens when you type google.com into the browser” question with “Well, most laptops have mechanical butterfly mechanism in their keyboards…”??

dmurray 7y ago
Right? Most browsers these days are run on mobile devices with capacitative touchscreens for input.
polynomial 7y ago
The kind you want to hire.
siphor 7y ago
its a well known question, probably someone who has previously thought about it

lbatx 7y ago

At a previous company, we too would administer a technical test. Our pass rate was close to what was described in the article (40% for ours vs 25%). However, our test was incredibly simple. At most, it should have take a competent developer two hours to complete [including writing comments and a README]. The assignment was to read a file containing a list of numbers (some formatted incorrectly, so there was some very simple parsing logic involved), call an API using each correctly formatted number as a parameter, and store what the API returned to a file. I am to this day stunned that 60% of people who passed a phone screen could not solve this task. Note that we gave them the input file, so it wasn't a matter of an edge case tripping them up or them getting one input file but the test input file having some other edge case. My point here is that it may be possible to get the same screening value with much less investment from the candidate.

matwood 7y ago
We also did similar take homes that at most should take an hour or two if someone really went overboard. I was amazed at what was returned. It wouldn’t compile or the candidate didn’t follow simple directions. I called it our version of a take home fizz buzz.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The ROI is probably low on the LeetCode hard questions. Most people that can solve LeetCode easy, plus have some sense of Design Patterns (so you know they can think big picture too)-- and you've got yourself a good candidate.
pmiller2 7y ago
We’re the other numbers in your funnel similar as well (phone screen pass, on-site pass, offer accepted)? I ask this because the numbers I saw in the article look remarkably similar to approximate numbers I’ve seen or been told about other companies.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  *were
- 7y ago

mherdeg 7y ago

> One of my favorite interview questions (created by Vikrum) was: “What happens after you type ‘https://www.google.com’ https://www.google.xn--com-to0a into a browser and hit enter?” Wow, I had no idea who came up with that question first. (see, e.g., https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when ). When was the first time it was asked? Where?

TheChaplain 7y ago

A "take home test" of 6 hours is a waste of my time. I'd rather spend those hours on a personal project which I can use for demonstrating to potential employers or perhaps use for a side-income.

gymnast35 7y ago

I interviewed with Andrew in Google for an internal team transfer as a Software Engineer. At the end of a very strange non-technical 30-minute interview where he sounded like an important and arrogant upper-management, I asked him what he was looking for and his reply was he wanted to hire someone that he liked and wanted to work with. That's seriously what it boils down to. I cannot take this article seriously. And "a history of working on challenging projects with real deliverables" sounds ridiculous, when you know they hired people straight from bootcamps as engineers.

mayop100 7y ago
I’m sorry you feel I was arrogant. I really do want to hire people “that I like and wanted to work with” though. I would hope most managers do. FWIW we never technically interviewed internal transfers inside Google (we counted on Google’s normal interview process to maintain the bar). We were just looking for team fit in those discussions. I’m disappointed you would belittle bootcamp graduates. Many of them are awesome, and we were lucky enough to hire one amazing one. And yes he did have a “history of working on challenging problems with real deliverables”, just not the CS kind in this case.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

DigitalSea 7y ago

>The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. Yeah, maybe if they're interviewing to work for Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft or other big-ticket dream companies a lot of developers want to work for. But, Andrew was talking about hiring for an early-stage startup, before Google even acquired them. As a startup, you're asking others to take a risk by working for you. Some engineers have families, debts and commitments to worry about. Working for an early-stage startup that might run out of money or collapse is a very real and likely risk. It's hard to argue that Firebase was not a roaring success for Andrew and others. But, expecting a candidate to do a six-hour test for a startup that statistically might not have succeeded, and furthermore, listing out the benefits of a take-home test being less stressful and then proceeding to describe what sounds like micromanagement under the guise of helping (by calling candidates at the start and during of the technical test). And we keep hearing there is a talented engineer shortage. Maybe the problem isn't a shortage, it's companies expecting engineers to be put through arduous and time-consuming interview processes like they're trying to get a job at NASA building human-payload rockets. For every company wanting to take hours and days of your time, there is another company that won't put you through a BS hiring process and make it faster. I work for a smaller company, I had two interviews for a front-end engineering position. I came in, met with the engineering lead and another senior. They didn't make me do a technical test, they opened up my GitHub profile on a large monitor, handed me a keyboard and mouse and asked me to pick one of my repositories and run them through my code and decisions that I had made. I chose a Javascript library I had built, they asked me things about the architecture, if I had tests, my thoughts on Webpack and other bundlers. It was all related to the library and all answers I could easily provide because I built it. No BS, just a pressure-free interview. The second and final interview was a coffee with the general manager and the engineering lead. They gave me more detail about why they're looking for someone, explained it was a new position and where they saw me fitting. I ended up having lunch with them and a couple of other team members who joined. It was all casual and pressure free. This company offered me $50k more than I was currently earning. It was a MASSIVE pay bump for me, and I didn't have to sacrifice hours of my family time just to be told I didn't pass or get the job. It's also a completely remote position, no commute whatsoever. No wonder this company has been around thirty years and many of the original hires are still here.

anthonybsd 7y ago

>The whole test was designed to take 6 hours. Pre-Screening to get to an onsite interview taking 6 hours? I'm sorry, but this is the exact toxic interview culture that is poisoning the job hiring process in tech startups. >Some of our employees enjoyed the test so much, in fact, that they continued working on their solutions after they were hired Jee, I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that they were, you know, new employees? As in, trying to put their best side forward and make a great impression? Did it even occur to you that you are inadvertently increasing their workload with your downright torturous screening process?

shubidubi 7y ago

2 issues i have with this "process": 1 - take-home task of "only" 6 hours. that's on top of the onsite (~6 hours) and a few hours for phone call and followups. that's too much for an unpaid job. 2 - they try to find people they know to sniff around about the candidate. that's usually bad as you can jeopardize the candidate's current job (usually people interview while still working at another place). overall this post made me want to work at firebase even less now.

01100011 7y ago

Take home tests are fine by me, but before you ask me to do that you better have sold me on the job first. If I really want the job, no problem. I expect, however, that spending 6 hours of my weekend on unpaid labor translates into a shorter on-site if you like the quality of my work. The goal of the on-site should be to verify that I was actually the person who did the work for the take-home. Things are a bit different when I'm some schmuck off the street begging for work. If you're trying to build a team and you want my skills, well, in this market I'm not putting a lot of energy into it. Case in point, I've had a company trying to hire me for over a year now. They're in consumer electronics and it is a fickle market so I kept turning them down, but I had a bad week at work and figured I'd go for it. I'd be an absolute perfect fit given my experience and what they're looking for, so it seemed like things were going to work out great. I accept an on-site, do well on a whiteboard coding test and a general review of my resume, and then one of their senior folks throws me an off-the-wall algorithm question(random sample a stream of data with uniform probability). Now, I'm an embedded guy, with an EE degree, and I specialize in "software engineering". They have many problems I'm perfectly suited to solving. They really, really need a guy like me(to design and fix drivers, abstraction layers, facilitate porting to new devices and enable third party clients). But here's this guy, asking me an algorithm question, and he didn't even explain it right. I googled the answer(reservoir sampling) when I was finished and understood the solution in a couple minutes, but it was too late. I was flagged for 2 more algorithm-heavy, 'cracking the coding' interviews the following Monday. I really didn't feel like spending my weekend reviewing bullshit I never use in my job, so I turned down the offer. It's too bad, I was a good fit for the team, and I was a great fit for the problems they were trying to solve.

nitwit005 7y ago

While it's certainly convenient to give everyone the same question, you'll find that questions asked by even smaller companies get posted online these days. You then give everyone willing to cheat an edge.

29athrowaway 7y ago

Candidates can cheat take-home exams by asking someone else to complete the assignment. After the assignment, you have to ask detailed questions about the code, solution approach and trade-offs. If what you have to offer is above average (compensation, growth opportunities, reputation, culture) people will be willing to make an extra effort. If you are offering the same as everyone else, candidates will deprioritize your interviews.

aryehof 7y ago

Smart, compliant, friendly and enthuastic. No problem domain, life or business experience required. Sounds neat until one realizes you can be replaced in an instant by one of the ever growing number of new "graduates" every year.

meuk 7y ago

Not a place I'd want to work, I think. Two red flags are: 1. They signal from the first point that all your time belongs to the company. Taking a test of 6 hours is not something I'd have time for. 2. Their company value "Give 110%, 33% of the Time" creeps me out. If someone is not satisfied when you give 100%, run away.

nurettin 7y ago

Really appreciate all the skills and positive attitude they were looking for and I think every engineer should strive to live up to their standards up until this part: …is excited about our company. Excitement should be deserved, which means it is a feeling which is acquired after working together for some time. It should not be required as the default position in a job interview. To build a great product, you need seasoned professionals, not gullible hipsters.

hising 7y ago

"we had a small team of just 24 exceptional people that I firmly believe was among the strongest of its kind in the world" I am absolutely sure that this is something A LOT of companies say and think about their current setup. Impossible to verify, just something that sounds great and makes the 24-people group feel special.

chank 7y ago

This is probably survivorship bias at work. A lot of startups have strong sense of self worth because they believe they are hiring/have the best candidates with their process. Let's be realistic, you can probably build a really good team out of just about any sampling of 1000 applicants with just a regular couple-hour interview process.

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Optim 7y ago

(rant) Startup idea: take away home assignments for a fee. You send us your code assignment we make it for you. We also provide you with code highlights so you can understand the code and architecture faster and have something to talk about on the onsite. Most of the work is not done by us but by "volunteers" . Who are these "volunteers" ? Desperate engineers looking for a role, who are thinking that our fake company is really wanting to hire them. We also get in touch with hiring managers and convince them to send take away assignments in order to increase our market. (/rant) I don't like code assignments because they can easily be abused by both companies and candidates and regardless of my opinion on it I think Firebase is awesome. I was an early adopter before you got adquired by Google.