I interviewed with Coinbase a couple years ago and had a horrible experience from start to finish. The whole team was super disorganized throughout and the people I talked to weren’t inspiring in the least. The CEO was super rude at the end of the process too.

I aced the stupid online test they wanted, then aced the phone interview with Brian (the CEO), and then on top of that they wanted me to come in and contract with them for a week as a “trial” which I did do partially (didn’t do the full week because I was busy that time of year). Their expectations of the trial were entirely unrealistic, misguided, and in some cases nonexistent (which is worse than misguided imo). It was doomed to fail from the beginning.

Anyway, jokes on them because they lost out on a great engineer. I wonder how many more they lost out on due to misguided and mismanaged hiring practices. Now I’m shipping software to more users than Coinbase can ever dream of, having more impact on those users than Bitcoin ever will, and making far more money to boot while working with a higher caliber Eng team. So I'm incredibly thankful for having dodged that bullet.

Was the trial week paid? If so, that's becoming a more common practice. Unpaid trial week? Pfft no way.

I wonder if they expect this "trial week" out of all candidates. A trial week of work, paid or not, pretty much eliminates from the hiring pool anyone who currently has a job (i.e. people who were already qualified by some other company at least once).

Most people just take a week of vacation. Especially if it's in another city. Take your SO and get a paid vacation.

Yes. Less than $100 an hour.

"An empty cart rattles loudly." Sounds like you and Coinbase were both better off for not working there.

Look, I've failed and passed many many interviews in my time. I’ve seen many different interview processes.

I've passed many interviews where I thought: "Wow that interview process truly sucked, even though I made it through".

I've failed many interviews where I still walked away thinking "That was a great interview experience, I respect everyone I interviewed with, it didn't work out, but I still admire the company and will cheer them on, and I learned some things too“.This was not one of those experiences, and I have no reason to dress it up as such.

If you think I’m an empty cart making a racket, feel free, I don’t really care for such one-liners. The only reason I even shared my experience interviewing at Coinbase is because I think we’re obligated to share our experiences in the industry for the benefit of our colleagues (past, present, and future!). I literally don’t gain anything from unfairly ranting about some random interview experience from a couple of years ago. This post just happened to remind me, and I figured some people might find it useful.

For all I know, Coinbase might have changed their process significantly since then and maybe the CEO stopped being rude to potential hires. Who knows? Certainly not me. They could even be an awesome employer today. But I do know that I personally won’t recommend the company just based on my single personal datapoint.

That's an asinine thing to assume. His is definitely not an isolated experience.

Not only that, but the whole interview seemed to be from bizarre-o world. A mix of awesome and WTF. Five minutes after sending an email to jobs@ you get asked to "hop on Skype"? Wow, that's pretty great. With most companies you're lucky if you even get an automated "We got your Email" message after 5 minutes.

Then it's "do two presentations by tomorrow". (I guess they assumed he had no plans for the evening). Then after what sounded like typical tech interview hazing, it only took 4 days for the company to decide? Wow!

It was bizarre to me, too. I thought most of what you mentioned was just testing his commitment. Solid commitment should mean something decent looking would come out of those efforts. The email and 4 days are probably just their instincts in action with some deliberation on latter after doing this kind of thing regularly for a long time.

I'm curious how long it takes on average for most VC's to go from good interview to acceptance.

Hustles are all about commitment, and one of the ways you can tell you're being hustled is when your side has to establish its decisionmaking ASAP while their decision process then can take however long they feel like.

That is a common pattern. I recently blew someone's alleged deal off because they needed a decision immediately. It's usually a bad sign but might be normal with VC's.

Exactly. The question is effectively equivalent to "have you recently taken an elementary number theory course", which, apart from being not at all a brutal mathematics problem, is totally irrelevant to what makes a good customer support hire.

The whole interview process comes off as having been designed by someone who had no idea what they were doing.

The worst part is this is implied by Olaf himself where he points out that he just lucked out on that problem in a way he doesn't expect to repeat. He accidentally passed the contrived problem unrelated to the job. They were just a hair from eliminating the good candidate in the interview.

Coinbase CEO here. Keep in mind - this was the first employee we hired. And it was 4.5 years ago.

As you can imagine, things may have changed a bit 120 employees and thousands of interviews later.

I think you'd find the experience quite different today.

I applied for a job and they told me I needed to do a 3 hour online test. I didn't reply back to them

Yeah, at that point you weigh the consulting time against the chance of the (job x salary) NPVed.

Is the answer something like "The lockers are pretty trashed, especially the hinges"?