As some of you are aware, my wife and I have been deliberating on a move to the Bay Area for quite a while, and near the completion of Powow, we decided it was time to pursue that further.  I considered the option to move out there and work remotely for Handmark, but thought it best to get immediately involved in a company out in SF to boost my personal network. I decided to follow two paths to locate companies I was interested in.  I picked products I can't live without and took a look at the parent company, and I also chose some of the top Y-Combinator companies.

After making a list of about 20 companies, I introduced myself to six, Evernote, Dropbox, Yelp, Posterous, AirBNB, Heroku.  Of these companies I went through phone screens and setup onsite interviews with Evernote, Posterous, AirBNB, and in the last minute, through a Reddit contact, Funzio.

I scheduled 3 days to do onsite interviews for the four companies, and was in San Francisco earlier in the month to walk through these.  I'll review the process below, however I'm going to refrain from bringing up specific problems as this would be rude.

Day 1 (AirBNB - Senior Android Engineer)

My Virgin flight landed at 9:45 and I took a cab into SoMA to make it by the 10:30 interview.  The office was the first thing that stood out to me, and it was obvious they employ quite a few designers.  Many of the meeting rooms are themed to look like some of their top rental homes, and most employees had a choice of a standing or sitting desk.  I waited around reception until 10:40 when I was ushered back to start the process.  My first interview was technical and involved problem solving a game, storing data into specified data structures and storing them appropriately.  The second two interviews went through my past experience, skills, and interests. 

Lunch was served in the break room, catered by a former Google chef, with a choice of Flank steak, broccolini, spring mix salad, and cucumber lemonade.  During Lunch I chatted with my recruiter regarding my goals, salary requirements, and interests in a specific job.

After Lunch I worked with the lead iOS developer, Andrew Vilcsak, to introduce a new feature on the current Android code base.  This was an interesting process that I recommended to see how the team worked together.  After this, I met two of the founders and covered many of my questions about the future of the company.  I still needed to meet with the CEO of the company, who was out of town, before they would consider me, as he hand picks each employee, however the feedback I received was very positive.

After a long day I headed back to my hotel (Hotel Triton), tried a sushi spot around the corner, and called it an early evening.  It was a long day, and tomorrow I was going through it all again.

Day 2 (Posterous - Senior Mobile Engineer)

Their office is right in the middle of the Mission, a very colorful neighborhood.  They are in an old renovated warehouse building under a yoga studio.

Right from the beginning of the process, I could tell this was a close knit group of people, and there was a great culture here.  I worked my way through the process starting with the VP of engineering, moving through server devs, managers, and finally the director of mobile, Adam Huda.  The technical challenges presented were worked through efficiently, and we covered my background and interests to a great extent.  The team here was very small and intimate, and everyone was very open.

Adam took me to dinner at the R&G Lounge and we had great conversation over awesome Pepper crab and IPA's covering everything from startups, to philosophy, scifi, and relationships.

I got along great with everyone here, and my final thoughts were "This is definitely a team I would have fun working with."  I was told I would receive an offer shortly.

Day 3 (Evernote - Senior Android Engineer, Funzio - Senior Android Engineer)

I woke up thinking this would be a rushed day, and boy was I right.  After catching the Cal Train to be in Mountain View by 9:00, I did a bit of preparation on the train.  I arrived in Mountain View and walked a couple blocks to the Evernote office.  I was a bit early, but the process started right away with Phil Constantinou.  

We jumped right into technical problems involving XML parsing, state, and unique data structures.  I was tested pretty heavily and had lost of a bit of my confidence by the end of this one.  The second engineer, from the Android team, focused on low level implementations.  

We worked through the problem, covered some optimizations, and then did some speculation on ways to handle some of the more advanced optimizations they have implemented on the Evernote core product.  I remember thinking to myself that this was a solid team and I could learn from these guys.  

The third engineer brought up many Layout and SDK related problems and we speculated on varying implementations to cover.  At the end of the interview, I was told I did well and would hear from them soon.

My experience at Evernote was the most rushed so far, but I walked away with a lot of respect for the skilled members of the team.

I took a cab back to SF to make my interview at Funzio.  We started the process right away, jumping into algorithm and data structure problems and brain teasers.  I discussed my background and future goals, and critiqued some code that was thrown my way.  in total I met with four engineers, a couple of the founders, and the recruiter.  I was told I would be the third addition to their android team.

The process was the very straight forward, and it seems like Funzio has a lot of room to grow in the social gaming market..

The Decision

A bit over a week later I had received three of the four offers and was seriously debating what I wanted out of my next job and my career.   Unfortunately, the AirBNB founders were very busy during the following week, and each time a Skype call was setup with the CEO to finalize the process, I was rescheduled.  With my timeline for the decision weighing in close, I decided to stop the process going forward with AirBNB to instead choose from the available offers.

I will honestly say, this was one of the hardest decisions I have made in a very long time.  I created a system to quantify everything of value to me in a company (ie. The product, prestige, culture, open source contributions, etc...), and equally compared the financial benefits being offered.  I had seriously considered Funzio, but I couldn't fully get behind the social gaming aspect personally.  I have seen many friends in the game industry burn out early, and I want my product to have a technical target audience, so I decided against Funzio.

At this point I had narrowed down the decision process to two companies, one which has the advantage of being a younger company and having a very social environment.  The other, having a more professional environment with a strong product.  I decided on Evernote, and it was a very hard decision.  I really respect the guys at Posterous and I hope I'll get to work with them in the future, but for now I think that Evernote will boost my career in the direction I want to go.

If you were to ask me for a recommendation in the Bay Area, I would definitely recommend any of these companies to you.