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Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#251

Post by anonymoushn »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #49
probably_wrong wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or some other overly-thought-through math that is bogus. So the mathematically-correct answer would be a minus while "in my opinion" would be a plus? I think your interview question brings you to your intended answer: the reason why every company makes their own process is because what's good for you would probably get you an instant fail in NASA and would get you labeled as "experience not relevant" in some resear…

> So the mathematically-correct answer would be a minus while "in my opinion" would be a plus? My opinion was only that it would be relatively easy to figure out. As far as I know, it is a certainty that sectioning a bubble sort, more or less than CPU cores, is less efficient. 16 threads on an 8 core CPU just means balancing 2 threads on every CPU core, each doing their own sorting and needing eventual merging back t…

If you have hyperthreading then a low IPC workload like this is optimally done on twice the number of cores.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#252

Post by judahmeek »

josephg wrote: post #216
rachofsunshine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our coding problem is easier than that (by a fair margin, it's all completely synchronous single-threaded procedural code unless you're doing something extremely weird) and it weeds out the vast majority of applicants. The same was true of all three of the standard coding problems Triplebyte used. They're not quite literal fizzbuzz, but they require - at best - some basic critical thinking and basic language features…

Triplebyte used to send candidates a link to a page which basically listed everything that was in the interview. Most candidates didn’t read it. They could probably have done away with the interview entirely and just put a link at the bottom of the prep material saying “click here to pass the interview”. If anything I think it would have lowered the triplebyte passing rate.

Why not try this as an experimental filter then and see what sort of population pass?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#253

Post by cgearhart »

> "But for all that I'd love to believe that that was because of the wonderful quality of our product, it realistically wasn't. It was ads."

> Why were we able to buy those ads? Because investors gave us a lot of money.

> And why do investors give companies a lot of money? On the expectation that they will pursue aggressive growth, not stop at small to middling scale.

This exactly describes the same lessons I learned working at Udacity around 2016-2018. We built–and then walked away from–a handful of moderately successful businesses that probably could've been run almost indefinitely at little marginal cost. Instead when we crossed 50k enrollments we pivoted–because 50k enrollments doesn't justify unicorn status.

(I don't think that was wrong; it's just that that's what the investors wanted.)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#254

Post by throwaway81523 »

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…

I did the online interview and then the in-person one and those worked out ok. But, I think Triplebyte was only viable because the huge engineering shortage at the time made that high-touch and expensive process worth pursuing. Its purpose was to find talented people who otherwise would fall through the cracks. Now there are unemployed engineers with impressive resumes everywhere, so there is less demand for a deep-digging recruiting operation like Triplebyte.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#255

Post by labaron »

I used FastTrack in the early days and loved the product.

Problem was their question bank was too small so it was easy for anyone motivated to cheat. I spent under an hour reading reviews of what questions were asked, prepared solutions for those questions, and then in the interview there were no surprises. I merely regurgitated my prepared solutions. One of them was making a tic tac toe game.

If employers knew how easy it was to pass the Triplebyte exam then I wonder how many would have allowed candidates to skip to onsite.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#256

Post by rachofsunshine »

cipheredStones wrote: post #246
rachofsunshine wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, if you've never hired before, you have no idea how bad this can get. Here's [1] our practice coding problem. It's quite similar to the one we use on our interview, and not too far from the one Triplebyte used in the past (ours is tuned to be slightly harder at the beginning and slightly easier at the end). The vast majority of candidates, even with some reasonable pre-filtering, do not get past the first s…

Oh, that brings back memories. When I interviewed with Triplebyte in 2018 and was rejected, my first item in the 'positive feedback' part of the email was "We saw some real strength on the tic tac toe section.", and my first item in the immediately following "the areas we think you can improve" paragraph was "We didn't see the coding proficiency we were looking for in the tic tac toe section--you didn't make very muc…

Well, some idiot must have written that email!

...it might have been me, I was writing those emails in the year 2018. That was my first job there.

Jokes aside, we generated those emails largely from a template. If I remember right, "saw some real strength" was "got at least an OK score for code quality", while the negative feedback below was about number of steps. The number of mishaps with that system is part of why we do the feedback a bit differently [1] at Otherbranch, at least for now. I think we did revamp it very late in that team's lifetime, just before Triplebyte pivoted and laid off most of the team that did those (two of us, me + one of my colleagues, moved over to a different team, which is why I'm in a position to tell the whole story).

[1] https://framerusercontent.com/images/ARBLIder7AsO5KlaEpClZ3W...

(As an aside I wish Framer'd let me link images directly on the proper domain.)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#257

Post by rachofsunshine »

cgearhart wrote: post #253

> "But for all that I'd love to believe that that was because of the wonderful quality of our product, it realistically wasn't. It was ads." > Why were we able to buy those ads? Because investors gave us a lot of money. > And why do investors give companies a lot of money? On the expectation that they will pursue aggressive growth, not stop at small to middling scale. This exactly describes the same lessons I learned…

I wonder if there should be a less-speculative investment arm whose entire model is "pick up the nonscalable businesses venture firms find and can't commit to". Sounds really interesting, actually! You need the speculation to find the niche, but then you need the not-speculative approach to exploit it.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#258

Post by rachofsunshine »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #234
rachofsunshine wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I remember once I worked at a company that was being acquired by another. As part of the screening we all had to go over to the other company to do an algorithms interview. Everyone - including my boss. Our company had a pretty softball interview process and most of our engineers hadn't been through a real gauntlet before. I knew what to expect, had practiced these things, and made it through. I tried to warn my coll…

None of this is a surprise to me, but the specific framing of trying to build these things into the interview is really interesting. It's already something I wanted to write about a lot, but it hadn't occurred to me to put it specifically into the process.

Honestly, having mental health people writing some content doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. I'm sure they hear it all the time; work is one of the biggest stressors in most peoples' lives.

I'm gonna think on this.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#259

Post by anonymoushn »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #230
cwillu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I think it would certainly help to receive a confirmation email. Thanks!

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#260

Post by anonymoushn »

josephg wrote: post #207
stackskipton wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minesweeper is all about storing data about the board and displaying the numbers is all about running through data. Seems very data structurey to me but maybe that's non heavy dev side coming through. Maybe I'm just thinking too much problem, overloaded my small attention brain and misread it. I wouldn't call Fizzbuzz data structure-y however. I'm also mostly outsider looking in. Never worked at FAANG and working wit…

I disagree. Minesweeper doesn’t require anything more exotic than a 2d array of enums. This is bread and butter stuff that you’ll run into in 99% of programs. If someone doesn't know how to use their language’s lists, enums and structs, I don’t think they know the language yet. A “data structure problem” would involve more exotic data structures, usually of the kind the candidate has to implement themselves. For exam…

I'm a competition programmer so my perspective is generally miscalibrated, but part 5 is usually solved with a BFS. You can say BFS is basic, and it's maybe the part of competition programming that comes up more often than any other in real life (tied with sentinels, which you usually use in your BFS?), but I think it's a "data structures" problem.
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