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Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#261

Post by josephg »

anonymoushn wrote: post #260
josephg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this test is calibrated like the triplebyte programming challenges, less than 1% of people will finish part 5 in the time given. I think when I was interviewing, only about 3% of people reached step 5 at all. Finishing was super rare, and it really only existed to separate the top couple percent. (And yes, we told the candidates that we didn’t expect them to finish in the time allocated). It doesn’t matter if step 5 is harder. Most people will never attempt it anyway.

But even then, while BFS would definitely work here, so would DFS and that’s simpler. A simple, unoptimised recursive DFS flood fill would be like 8 lines or something given by that stage you already have a function to reveal a cell. You just have to call it on all the adjacent cells. I don't see that as a data structure problem. You could argue it’s an algorithm problem, but it’s about as easy as those come.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#262

Post by happyopossum »

evantbyrne wrote: post #112
janalsncm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is law a good example? My understanding is if you didn’t go to a top 14 school (whoever came up with that arbitrary number) it basically forecloses on the best opportunities.

A similar pattern exists in tech startup hiring practices and which ones attract VC funding. Not unusual to see funded startups with founders who have no work experience but Stanford degrees. Before my time at The Atlantic, I had a couple recruiters for no-name startups tell me I didn't have a prestigious enough background to be hired. There is a highly-visible class hierarchy in tech that many people in the industry…

Don’t listen to recruiters? They lie. I have been at several startups, including a massive unicorn, and now work at a faang.

I have no college experience whatsoever.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#263

Post by anonymoushn »

josephg wrote: post #261
anonymoushn wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this test is calibrated like the triplebyte programming challenges, less than 1% of people will finish part 5 in the time given. I think when I was interviewing, only about 3% of people reached step 5 at all. Finishing was super rare, and it really only existed to separate the top couple percent. (And yes, we told the candidates that we didn’t expect them to finish in the time allocated). It doesn’t matter if step…

Got me there! The situation where you already have that stuff definitely favors DFS and makes it pretty trivial

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#264

Post by cgearhart »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #257
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.

That’s an interesting idea! There’s already a lot of companies that are founded out of the graveyard of startups that failed to scale. (Sound familiar?) ;-)

I think the conventional wisdom would say that it’s not worth the effort to put together those smaller companies though; those resources would be better spent finding a different business that could scale. It would probably depend on whether there are any efficiencies of operating many such businesses.

Aside: good luck with Otherbranch. TripleByte was a critical part of my own career journey in 2018/2019, so I’m keen to see how it goes this time around. My complaints about TB were basically that it was too focused on SF Bay Area (I get it…), and it didn’t have an ML track until long after it was relevant for me.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#265

Post by wan23 »

marcinzm wrote: post #104
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…

> 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. Wonder if this will ever be solved. The airplane pilot interview process on top of the standardized government certifications includes: - On-line…

It's completely different from software engineering interviews. The process you described for airline pilots gets to the actual qualifications for the job. Whereas for software engineers, literally no one needs to reverse a binary tree yet they base the decision on in large part on this sort of question. Ideally, the BS would be encapsulated in a certification so that interviews can focus on the real useful stuff.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#266

Post by rachofsunshine »

cgearhart wrote: post #264
rachofsunshine wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s an interesting idea! There’s already a lot of companies that are founded out of the graveyard of startups that failed to scale. (Sound familiar?) ;-) I think the conventional wisdom would say that it’s not worth the effort to put together those smaller companies though; those resources would be better spent finding a different business that could scale. It would probably depend on whether there are any efficie…

I can't see why it wouldn't be worth the effort to assemble a suite of companies with millions in ARR. It might not be funding-AirBnB-level profitable, but there's plenty of money in it, and your hit rate would be far higher.

Structure it as something akin to an accelerator, pitch it as the way to run a company with less risk and less of the wild existential uncertainty of being a traditional founder, take a big chunk of equity to compensate for the idea being prefab and maybe give a payout to the pivoting company as a pseudo-fire-sale acquisition (which also funds their pivot), take on some employees who liked the pre-pivot thing and set them up with your Very Talented Founders(TM), and go to town.

This should exist. The more I think about it the more I think it's an excellent idea.

> Aside: good luck with Otherbranch. TripleByte was a critical part of my own career journey in 2018/2019, so I’m keen to see how it goes this time around. My complaints about TB were basically that it was too focused on SF Bay Area (I get it…)

Thanks! Hopefully the Bay Area thing might be less of an issue for us, because (a) we're recruiting specifically for individual roles (so we're not burning a bunch of cash if we get a good candidate where we can't place them yet) and (b) tech has definitely dispersed from the Bay over the last few years, even if not completely. I'd love to work with some of the Sun Belt startup scene.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#267

Post by marcinzm »

wan23 wrote: post #265
marcinzm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wonder if this will ever be solved. The airplane pilot interview process on top of the standardized government certifications includes: - On-line…

It's completely different from software engineering interviews. The process you described for airline pilots gets to the actual qualifications for the job. Whereas for software engineers, literally no one needs to reverse a binary tree yet they base the decision on in large part on this sort of question. Ideally, the BS would be encapsulated in a certification so that interviews can focus on the real useful stuff.

So needing to get yearly re-certifications in Leetcode questions is viewed as preferably by you than having to only study them for interviews? And spending 10+ hours on coding exercises, un-paid, per job is also seen as preferably by you to the current status on top of the yearly Leetcode certification? On top of a full panel of behavioral interviews? Plus needing to take an IQ style assessment online before each job (see the second item on my list)?

I'll take having to study Leetcode every few years over all of that any day of the week.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#268

Post by itronitron »

josephg wrote: post #208
itronitron wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is embedding game logic (game rules) into the matrix, which is a data structure, hence it is a data structure question

You don’t need to embed game rules into the matrix to solve this problem. (What does that mean anyway?) Just store the board in a 2d array of some sort and write some functions to interact with it.

>> store the board in a 2d array of some sort and write some functions to interact with it

thereby making it a data structure problem

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#269

Post by josephg »

itronitron wrote: post #268
josephg wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to embed game rules into the matrix to solve this problem. (What does that mean anyway?) Just store the board in a 2d array of some sort and write some functions to interact with it.

>> store the board in a 2d array of some sort and write some functions to interact with it thereby making it a data structure problem

That’s just not what a “data structure problem” commonly means. If it was, all programs would be data structure problems because all programs interact with data in some form.

A data structure problem is a problem where designing and implementing an appropriate data structure is in some way hard. A 2d array doesn’t fit the bill. It’s not exotic enough.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#270

Post by bigsapper »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #194
racional wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A meaningful explanation of why a bridge collapsed would be: "Facing financial pressure, the board voted to re-open the bridge despite advice from its own experts that it was unsafe and faced a high chance of catastrophic failure." What I'm hearing instead -- is a categorical focus on "incentive pressures", rather than on the obvious lapse of sound judgement on the part of those responsible. As revealed, quite plainl…

If I gave that impression, I apologize. It wasn't my intent. So let me say clearly: it was a lapse of sound judgement, I disagreed with it both then and now, I've said so both publicly and internally since the day it happened, and I think a lot about how to avoid such errors myself. I don't want to minimize the error. I want to show it in the light in which it was made, because no one ever comes up to you in business…

"... because no one ever comes up to you in business and says "hello, do you want to sell your soul today?". That's not what moral compromise looks like."

Actually. it looks exactly like that. It can also be more subtly, but is usually more up front.

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