On January 21st, just past midnight, I filled out a form on careers.mozilla.org describing why I believe I’ll be a good fit for the Firefox for Android team, clicked submit, and went to bed. I woke up to an email from a recruiter at mozilla - they wanted to chat. I’ll summarize the process here if anyone’s curious:

  1. phone screen with a recruiter. a 15-20 minute chat about my experience, and why I’m interested in mozilla. General information about how the process works.
  2. phone interview with team’s manager lasted just over an hour, we’ve talked about my past professional experience, various projects I’ve been involved in. Chatted about mozilla, the team, the work, and why I’m interested in mozilla in particular
  3. homework assignment was the next step. Essentially take a working android app and add some functionality to it. I had about a week to complete it, and was asked not to spend much time on it. It took me a few hours (around 3 iirc), involved doing a few things which I haven’t had to do with Android prior (so lots of googling around) - nothing complicated, it’s just that my android experience at that point was somewhat particular.
  4. engineering interview to discuss the assignment lasted about an hour, and was conducted by one of the team members. We’ve chatted about my design decisions, how I would expand on the solution, how I would approach certain tasks, etc.
  5. on-site interview was conducted in Vancouver. Five one hour interviews, lunch, and a chat afterwards. Everyone was very friendly and supportive, and although I was pretty tired at the end the whole process was pretty fun. Discussions were about my past experience, especially at CommandWear, general software engineering and android questions, tooling, etc. One of the interviews was a live coding session, which at a point included use of a somewhat obscure javascript API that I had to quickly learn - that was good fun, and I’ve only managed to crash the browser once :)
  6. job offer! I received a formal offer on February 24th (so just over a month after applying), and it was signed a few days later.

Generally it really felt that the process, in a way, “sets you up for success” - spoken with a clear selection bias! Chatting at length with my future co-workers was great, certainly a good way to gauge what I’m getting myself into. As I went through the steps above and interacted with more people at the company, it all started to become progressivly more interesting - people are smart, open, problems are interesting and plenty. Mozilla’s openness and commitment to its open source community is certainly unique in the industry, and an intriquing thing to experience. People talked openly about problems they’ve experienced, and various peculiarities of work - no organization is perfect, after all.

In the end though, it’s a bit like a flower that keeps opening up, and then a month later you find yourself coming in for the first day of work :-)