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Why Triplebyte Failed

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#221

Post by cwillu »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #218
cwillu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, having completed the practice problem with about 45 seconds to spare, what sort of openings are there for the aging-but-not-aged Canadian who can probably only manage part-time remote work?

I don't anticipate us getting a lot of clients with budget for a part-time employee anytime soon, unfortunately. I imagine a lot will be remote, but probably not part time. Still happy to have you in our pool in case we do (I think I see you in the signups list - something about oddball proprietary languages, yeah?) but it's not a wildly high-probability bet in the short term. I really, really, really wish I had a be…

Fair enough, yep, that's me.

I do wonder how my “part time” output would compare the expectations from full-time output. During the periods I've worked more conventional jobs, the vast majority of the value I brought was during the oddball times/contributions. Surely there must be some way I can be exploited (in a good way) without implicitly bundling ancillary seat warming into the contract. :D

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#222

Post by jiveturkey »

distortedsignal wrote: post #142
jiveturkey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not evaluating this on a proper A/B basis. I dare say, you might not have landed at Flexport but you would have landed somewhere ? pedantry: surely you didn't go to a random apartment, rather it was their apartment.

I'm another TripleByte placement. After my (virtual) TB interview (which I barely passed), I had onsites at 5 places. After the five on-site interviews, I had 2 job offers, one of which was a company I wanted to work for since graduating college. I took the other offer. This was preceded by a four or five month job search. I had received two offers in that time, but nothing seemed great. I think TB's process kinda wo…

I'm actually not all that skeptical of TB's approach. They built a real business around it, way more targetted than eg Karat. Even though ultimately unsuccessful, that is surely more due to PMF and various missteps, than to lack of advantage for individual applicants vs spray and pray approach. (When taken as an average across all applicants.)

I'm just highlighting that GP's specific anecdote doesn't really demonstrate that advantage. Your example seems much more clear.

Somewhat OT for this specific sub-thread but I wonder how much "OA" tools that are part of coderpad etc, contributed to TB's demise. These are meant to be fizzbuzz kind of pre-screens. I know TB's approach was more than that, but from the hiring side, was the value not there since you'd always (?) have your own coding exercise after the TB screening.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#223

Post by taway-20230404 »

Yet another Triplebyte placement chiming in. The FastTrack product worked incredibly well for me in 2018. At the time, I had just over a year of full-time SWE experience but was struggling to get any traction, being still relatively-junior and without a degree; my open-source work wasn't cutting it. Meanwhile, the '90s legacy tech company I had ended up with was proving to be a professional dead-end.

I took Triplebyte's test, did their interview, apparently did pretty well (at that point in time, they weren't showing candidates their own scoring) and over a period of about 2 weeks chatted with 14(???) different companies. I narrowed it down to three onsites and ended up with two strong offers, one of which I took.

I'm no longer in that role, but I now work as an infosec-focused SWE at a prominent Bay Area fintech. I get to lead work I care about, and get compensated in a way that I couldn't have dreamed of ten years ago. Triplebyte made that possible for me in a very concrete and permanent way. My resume in 2018 was the kind of thing a lot of hiring managers would've tossed; not any more.

The loyalty I feel towards a company that's no longer around makes me wonder if Triplebyte could've worked on a longer timescale. I'm now the kind of candidate they were trying to acquire via Screen, and if they still existed, they'd have a very good shot at recruiting me on behalf of their clients.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#224

Post by cwillu »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #218
cwillu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, having completed the practice problem with about 45 seconds to spare, what sort of openings are there for the aging-but-not-aged Canadian who can probably only manage part-time remote work?

I don't anticipate us getting a lot of clients with budget for a part-time employee anytime soon, unfortunately. I imagine a lot will be remote, but probably not part time. Still happy to have you in our pool in case we do (I think I see you in the signups list - something about oddball proprietary languages, yeah?) but it's not a wildly high-probability bet in the short term. I really, really, really wish I had a be…

Incidentally, I didn't get a confirmation email; might be something to consider adding to the form workflow.

My email is the obvious one given my username, on the off-chance I made a typo.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#225

Post by drewcoo »

ff317 wrote: post #155
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…

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...

Yet frankly, what most of us do is more like plumbing than art. In that we're just fitting systems together and in that it's actual skilled labor and in that we're seen by everyone else as the ones willing to do the shitty work.

Management puts up with us and they pay us because even though they think they can do our work, they wouldn't want to.

Plumbers are licensed and unionized, two possible solutions to the problems posed in this thread.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#226

Post by rachofsunshine »

taway-20230404 wrote: post #223

Yet another Triplebyte placement chiming in. The FastTrack product worked incredibly well for me in 2018. At the time, I had just over a year of full-time SWE experience but was struggling to get any traction, being still relatively-junior and without a degree; my open-source work wasn't cutting it. Meanwhile, the '90s legacy tech company I had ended up with was proving to be a professional dead-end. I took Triplebyt…

> The loyalty I feel towards a company that's no longer around makes me wonder if Triplebyte could've worked on a longer timescale.

Yeah, I started a company basically because I got tired of wondering about that.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#227

Post by josephg »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #217
josephg wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was one of triplebyte’s interviewers years ago and I can speak to this. In short, you’re right. But two notes: First, you massively underestimate the range of coding speed you see in an interview. The slowest programmers weren’t senior people who were out of practice. (I interviewed plenty of them). It was people who just seem bad at programming. Like, so bad it takes them 25 minutes to make a hello world program r…

We plan to, for the record. We just didn't have it ready for prime-time yet, so it isn't there right now.

Fair. A good debugging challenge is pretty hard to write well. I remember one of the triplebyte ones I worked on passed through several hands trying to get the calibration right.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#228

Post by elicksaur »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #43
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do we let someone fly hundreds of people through the upper atmosphere with a certificate, but you can't make a login page with javascript without a unique multi-day interview for each distinct company?

what do you think the interview process for airline pilot looks like?

>“Hello, I am a certified pilot.”

>“Great! You start tomorrow!”

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#229

Post by rachofsunshine »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #210
rachofsunshine wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stress I'll grant you. But what's your alternative to selectiveness? Is your expectation that companies, who are spending a substantial amount of money to hire someone, should not try to hire the best person they can get for their buck? Like, I'm enough of a leftie to agree with the idea that one's ability to contribute in the workplace shouldn't determine your ability to live a decent life. But that doesn't mean com…

I do not have an alternative and agree that this type of screening is necessary. I just think the fundamental problem here is not procedural as the post seems to suggest - but rather social-psychological. Making the experience less painful to the losers is the key problem to solve. That would fix the candidate pipeline problem because people would be less terrified of failure. I don't know how to solve it. To quote L…

Yeah, the psychology of it is rough. Mental health is something I care a lot about, because in another life it damn near killed me [1], and it's something I plan to write a lot about at least. I'm not sure I have much of a concrete solution, though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40493572

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#230

Post by rachofsunshine »

cwillu wrote: post #224
rachofsunshine wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't anticipate us getting a lot of clients with budget for a part-time employee anytime soon, unfortunately. I imagine a lot will be remote, but probably not part time. Still happy to have you in our pool in case we do (I think I see you in the signups list - something about oddball proprietary languages, yeah?) but it's not a wildly high-probability bet in the short term. I really, really, really wish I had a be…

Incidentally, I didn't get a confirmation email; might be something to consider adding to the form workflow. My email is the obvious one given my username, on the off-chance I made a typo.

It got submitted properly and looks like the correct email. Airflow - at least the plan we're on - caps the number of emails to different addresses that it'll send a day, so we hadn't set up confirmations, but I guess normal volume probably isn't a problem for that. (Woulda been fun today, though.)
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