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Why Triplebyte Failed

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#181

Post by anonymoushn »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wo…

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

What's your approach for parallelizing bubble sort in a way that profits from cores beyond the first?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#182

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

recursive wrote: post #159
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting point, but then one wonders that if software eng are ultimately artists, why are we not having them work on their portfolios like the other art disciplines? Is that the fundamental problem?

> why are we not having them work on their portfolios? Who is having whom? Having a portfolio of work is a well understood benefit, and a lot of candidates have been doing it for some time.

I think it's frowned upon in many circles because most of the work you do for a living cannot be released to the public, so there's an expectation that you will be cranking out work for free on the side just to build a portfolio, which is not inclusive for say.. a minority mother of three, who doesn't have the time, and it only favors young affluent white and Asian males with no dependents.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#183

Post by shagie »

stevula wrote: post #122
giraffe_lady wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current system is already gamed and virtually standardized. This is only remotely true if you're looking at a very narrow slice of software development jobs. Those companies and jobs are overrepresented here, but remember that even in the US the majority of developers do not work at recognizable "tech companies." Much less the rest of the world. I've been a professional software developer for over a decade, cha…

This might be a regional thing, but I have done probably around 100 technical interviews in my career (both enterprise and startups) mostly in the Bay Area and the vast majority of these involved algorithm questions that had no relation with the job function. Most were around the difficulty of "find the largest palindrome in a string" or "reverse a singly linked list". On the harder end were things like "serialize an…

> and the vast majority of these involved algorithm questions that had no relation with the job function.

Consider the problem that you're hiring a software engineer and the company has has openings in several different teams that only have the job title in common.

Do you have four different sets of problems that are related to job functions? Does the interview take four times longer? Or do you extend offers to a dozen software developers this week and then have the teams that have the most need / the applicant appears to be best suited for add the headcount there?

If you are giving the same interview to all the candidates (so that you're trying to eliminate bias of asking different questions of different people) ... would that not tend to be solved by asking more abstract questions that are then compared to an agreed upon rubric as to which candidates were "meets expectations"?

... And what if it is for one team that has one set of problems... Do you have the candidates sign NDAs so that you can show them the actual problems that you then go pursue if something leaks? And if today's actual problem is solved tomorrow (unrelated to the applicants solution ... though I've experienced some "here is some real problems we are having" and startups trying to get an hour or two of consulting time for free with no intent to hire), do you give a different interview for someone next week?

The standardized and unrelated work means that you're not accidentally getting in trouble with HR with some bias in the questions or running afoul of FSLA by having someone do uncompensated work that might be related to real things being done.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#184

Post by gwbas1c »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #133
Glyptodon wrote: post #128

I took their quiz without thinking once from a throwaway account because I was afraid of taking it from a real account and also because I had no context about what would be in it, which made it seem high risk. That made me realize it wasn't as scary a thing as I was afraid it might be, but also kind of summerizes what I don't love about it. Later, I think I took the quiz from a real email. I think could have schedule…

Oooh, this lets me tell a great anecdote that didn't have a place in the post. So it turns out you were not alone. Getting people who did well on the quiz - whose parameters were trained on interview performance, by the way, so "did well on the quiz" was synonymous with "had a good shot at the interview" - to sign up for interviews was a major problem for a while. The solution? We told them the first booking was just…

> *The solution? We told them the first booking was just a "practice" interview. And then if they did well, surprise, it was a real interview all along. (If they didn't, we'd let them try again, though it almost never changed the outcome.)

Honestly, saying it's a "practice" interview, and then saying "Oh, you did so well we're just going to let you skip the real one" isn't lying. Some people might need to believe there's a safety net in order to join. Other people might really need practice.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#185

Post by crooked-v »

recursive wrote: post #163
shalmanese wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a market for lemons but it's also an incredibly inefficient market for lemons. It's amazing just how much gold is randomly lying on the ground on the lemon market you can just occasionally pick up. The classic story is some engineer who got picked up by a company when they were 22, did well and got promoted a few times and then runs into a terrible boss that makes their tenure untenable at 29 and goes out onto t…

So, what's the more pleasant path? I'm well more than 7 years in at this point. And I've spent precious little time in the job market at large. But if my current employer had a problem, it's occurred to me that I don't really know how to find a job. What do people do?

I would assume the answer is 'just network bro', as if that's supposed to actually be helpful.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#186

Post by shagie »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #70
joshuahedlund wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every airplane flies pretty much the same way, and pilots all get paid pretty much the same* Every website stack, and the level of complexity under it, is unique, and there's also a huge pay differential. *could be false assumption on my part

Maybe it’s time to start thinking about doing to software what has been done with other professional fields: licensing and checking out of various levels. If I have to spend 30 hours or so learning, practicing and demonstrating my knowledge about aircraft instrument procedures before I can attempt that as a pilot in real airspace, maybe it’s not that big of a jump that we’d license different software features, and go…

I have interviewed people who have attested to having a Java certification from Oracle that while they were able to pass that test, they were unable to use their knowledge to develop solutions or solve problems.

I could ask about how the class loader worked or the syntax associated with a particular construct (that that language level - not anything later) and get the correct answer.

They could pass tests and follow instructions.

Licensure for problem solving is difficult. Extend that to different domains and it is an even harder problem to solve.

https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncees-en...

> The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.

> NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.

> In 2013, the software exam became the latest addition to the family of PE exams. The exam was developed by NSPE, IEEE-USA, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Texas Board of Professional Engineers—a group known as the Software Engineering Consortium. Partnering with NCEES, the consortium began working in 2007 to spread the word about the importance of software engineering licensure for the public health, safety, and welfare.

> This collaboration was preceded by Texas becoming the first state to license software engineers in 1998. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers ended the experience-only path to software engineering licensure in 2006; before the 2013 introduction of the software engineering PE exam, licensure candidates had to take an exam in another discipline.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#187

Post by josephg »

itronitron wrote: post #162
rachofsunshine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooh, this lets me tell a great anecdote that didn't have a place in the post. So it turns out you were not alone. Getting people who did well on the quiz - whose parameters were trained on interview performance, by the way, so "did well on the quiz" was synonymous with "had a good shot at the interview" - to sign up for interviews was a major problem for a while. The solution? We told them the first booking was just…

I've never had two in-person interviews that were at all similar in any way. Maybe instead of a 'practice' interview people can just be told what to expect so they know how to prepare. Offering practice interviews just makes it sound like the interview is a performance.

The triplebyte interviews were pretty tightly scripted to try and remove interviewer bias. If you did two interviews with TB, you would have found them pretty similar.

We also did tell candidates what to expect and how to prepare. Most candidates didn’t read our preparation notes. The people who did did better in the interview.

(Source: I was one of TB’s interviewers.)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#188

Post by plasticchris »

itronitron wrote: post #162
rachofsunshine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooh, this lets me tell a great anecdote that didn't have a place in the post. So it turns out you were not alone. Getting people who did well on the quiz - whose parameters were trained on interview performance, by the way, so "did well on the quiz" was synonymous with "had a good shot at the interview" - to sign up for interviews was a major problem for a while. The solution? We told them the first booking was just…

I've never had two in-person interviews that were at all similar in any way. Maybe instead of a 'practice' interview people can just be told what to expect so they know how to prepare. Offering practice interviews just makes it sound like the interview is a performance.

They told you (or me at least) almost exactly everything that would be in the interview ahead of time, to the point that I just recalled a lot from my notes I made the night before the call. Source: I completed the TB process, but it was 8ish years ago.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#189

Post by gwbas1c »

Uehreka wrote: post #35
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wo…

If you create a standardized test it will be gamed. Even with the small modicum of standardization around interview questions that we currently see, people have published books like Cracking The Code Interview, making it easier for people who don’t have the skills for a particular job to pass interviews at any place that uses standard-ish questions. Furthermore, as an avowed enemy of “Clean Code”, I don’t want to see…

> If you create a standardized test it will be gamed.

Well, the medial profession has a standardized licensing process. It's not perfect, but it certainly keeps the interview process to (mostly) mutual interest.

I think we can learn from the medical profession here. Otherwise, "I prefer chaos" implies that the incompetents are the ones who are the ones who will lose.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#190

Post by gwbas1c »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #158
ff317 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that software development is less like hiring an airline pilot or a structural engineer, and more like hiring an artist. Try making up a "standard exam" that will tell you whether an artist will produce several great unique works for you in the future, so you know which one to hire...

That's an interesting point, but then one wonders that if software eng are ultimately artists, why are we not having them work on their portfolios like the other art disciplines? Is that the fundamental problem?

> one wonders that if software eng are ultimately artists

I find treating software engineering like art is a very dangerous approach and bound for failure.

A lot of software engineering comes down to being comfortable with code and how the computer works. That has little to nothing to do with art.

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