How Firebase Interviewed Software Engineers

&gt; 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.<p>This is the part that didn&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to give more incentive than just a job being available before I&#x27;d spend a day on a take-home, unpaid project. So according to the quote above, I&#x27;m not the strongest candidate because I&#x27;m not willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job.<p>Maybe from the hiring manager&#x27;s point of view, that is even true. But I&#x27;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&#x27;t the answer. Give us something quicker. Maybe not easier... I believe a challenging interview process is fair. But quicker.

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 :)<p>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&#x27;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.

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].<p>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&#x27;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.<p>My point here is that it may be possible to get the same screening value with much less investment from the candidate.

&gt; Then, after they submitted their answer, we would provide them with a thorough and detailed code review (usually by the legendary @mikelehen).<p>&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;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.

I&#x27;ve seen a lot of companies that, like firebase, try to assess if a candidate &quot;is excited about our company&quot; early in the process.<p>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&#x27;ve talked to a number of people across a variety of roles, seen your office, heard about the work, explored the culture, etc etc.<p>During the initial screen, I really only know about your business, which is not the biggest factor for me.

&gt; The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job.<p>... only for the 1-2 top companies they are interviewing for.<p>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%.<p>Another problem is, usually what is expected and how the project will be judged is not mentioned beforehand;<p>- so do I write unit tests?<p>- do you want docs for running it?<p>- should it include deployment instructions&#x2F;code?<p>- does have to support 5000 req&#x2F;s?<p>- how important is clean code for this?<p>each add more time and these kind of question are never ending.<p>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.<p>Finally, let&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;even if you don&#x27;t hire me I am very grateful for doing the project, did learn a lot&quot; She joined and quickly became a very productive colleague.<p>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.

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&#x27;s seriously what it boils down to.<p>I cannot take this article seriously. And &quot;a history of working on challenging projects with real deliverables&quot; sounds ridiculous, when you know they hired people straight from bootcamps as engineers.

This article is worth reading just for the description about the take-home coding challenge.<p>I agree that 4 hours is a good target, and that the coding challenge must be fun and in an language of the candidate&#x27;s choice.<p>&gt; 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.<p>As a candidate, I encountered this situation twice, but it was because the coding challenge was poorly designed.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t one that I did any work in. No one responded to my questions, so again, I walked away.

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.<p>Yikes.

&quot;As a startup, process speed and transparency are your secret weapons when competing for candidates with large companies.&quot;<p>Amen. I&#x27;ve known people who got through Google&#x27;s interview process, but even then the response is &quot;Great job, we&#x27;ll let you know within a few months if there&#x27;s an opening on a team you can join.&quot;<p>Not a great response when you&#x27;re graduating soon and you&#x27;ve got concrete offers from other companies that will expire.

&gt;The whole test was designed to take 6 hours.<p>Pre-Screening to get to an onsite interview taking 6 hours? I&#x27;m sorry, but this is the exact toxic interview culture that is poisoning the job hiring process in tech startups.<p>&gt;Some of our employees enjoyed the test so much, in fact, that they continued working on their solutions after they were hired<p>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?

I&#x27;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&#x27;re well structured, as it appears here, they can be fun and hopefully build enthusiasm about the company. If they&#x27;re not, it&#x27;s a huge red flag. A company that doesn&#x27;t value my time as a candidate is unlikely to do so as an employee, and isn&#x27;t one I want to work with.<p>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&#x27;t wasted.

2 issues i have with this &quot;process&quot;:<p>1 - take-home task of &quot;only&quot; 6 hours. that&#x27;s on top of the onsite (~6 hours) and a few hours for phone call and followups. that&#x27;s too much for an unpaid job.<p>2 - they try to find people they know to sniff around about the candidate. that&#x27;s usually bad as you can jeopardize the candidate&#x27;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.

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.<p>Things are a bit different when I&#x27;m some schmuck off the street begging for work. If you&#x27;re trying to build a team and you want my skills, well, in this market I&#x27;m not putting a lot of energy into it.<p>Case in point, I&#x27;ve had a company trying to hire me for over a year now. They&#x27;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&#x27;d go for it. I&#x27;d be an absolute perfect fit given my experience and what they&#x27;re looking for, so it seemed like things were going to work out great.<p>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&#x27;m an embedded guy, with an EE degree, and I specialize in &quot;software engineering&quot;. They have many problems I&#x27;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&#x27;s this guy, asking me an algorithm question, and he didn&#x27;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, &#x27;cracking the coding&#x27; interviews the following Monday. I really didn&#x27;t feel like spending my weekend reviewing bullshit I never use in my job, so I turned down the offer. It&#x27;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.

A &quot;take home test&quot; of 6 hours is a waste of my time.<p>I&#x27;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.

Not a place I&#x27;d want to work, I think. Two red flags are:<p>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&#x27;d have time for.<p>2. Their company value &quot;Give 110%, 33% of the Time&quot; creeps me out. If someone is not satisfied when you give 100%, <i>run away</i>.

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.<p>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.

&quot;we had a small team of just 24 exceptional people that I firmly believe was among the strongest of its kind in the world&quot;<p>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.

This overlaps a bit with RFP processes.<p>If you get a request for a proposal where the potential customer &#x2F; hiring committee clearly just copy&#x2F;pasted a set of items that don&#x27;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.<p>If someone has an interesting set of question or a clean and focused RFP, fantastic. GO for it, you will enjoy working with them.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Another one - if they won&#x27;t tell you what they need or who they are - not worth it.

(rant)<p>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.<p>Most of the work is not done by us but by &quot;volunteers&quot; .<p>Who are these &quot;volunteers&quot; ?<p>Desperate engineers looking for a role, who are thinking that our fake company is really wanting to hire them.<p>We also get in touch with hiring managers and convince them to send take away assignments in order to increase our market.<p>(&#x2F;rant)<p>I don&#x27;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.

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.

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

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:<p><pre><code> …is excited about our company. </code></pre> Excitement should be deserved, which means it is a feeling which is acquired <i>after</i> 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.

&gt; One of my favorite interview questions (created by Vikrum) was: “What happens after you type ‘<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com’" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.xn--com-to0a</a> into a browser and hit enter?”<p>Wow, I had no idea who came up with that question first. (see, e.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alex&#x2F;what-happens-when" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alex&#x2F;what-happens-when</a> ).<p>When was the first time it was asked? Where?

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

This is probably survivorship bias at work. A lot of startups have strong sense of self worth because they believe they are hiring&#x2F;have the best candidates with their process. Let&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; 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.<p>We&#x27;re lucky to have this in the software industry as standard practice. Has anyone had horror stories otherwise?

&gt;The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job.<p>Yeah, maybe if they&#x27;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.<p>As a startup, you&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;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).<p>And we keep hearing there is a talented engineer shortage. Maybe the problem isn&#x27;t a shortage, it&#x27;s companies expecting engineers to be put through arduous and time-consuming interview processes like they&#x27;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&#x27;t put you through a BS hiring process and make it faster.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>The second and final interview was a coffee with the general manager and the engineering lead. They gave me more detail about why they&#x27;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.<p>This company offered me $50k more than I was currently earning. It was a MASSIVE pay bump for me, and I didn&#x27;t have to sacrifice hours of my family time just to be told I didn&#x27;t pass or get the job. It&#x27;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.

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

[author here]<p>Hi all - I hope you find this useful!<p>If you have questions or want to know more I’m hosting a live stream Q&amp;A today on Twitter at 1 PM Pacific. Tune in and bring your interviewing and hiring questions! I&#x27;m @startupandrew on Twitter.

While it&#x27;s certainly convenient to give everyone the same question, you&#x27;ll find that questions asked by even smaller companies get posted online these days. You then give everyone willing to cheat an edge.

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…”??