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Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#271

Post by kenschu »

altdataseller wrote: post #248
kenschu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One that we have to tread carefully! I should have clarified - we're not just putting an LLM on the other side of the candidate and letting it drive decisions. Instead think of things use cases like content generation (we don't have a problem library - we create custom problems/modules for each customer of ours), etc. That's where I think you can improve signal a lot, by setting up a better situation to assess the ca…

By content generation, do you mean take home problems or interview questions?

Both! Generally more of the former.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#272

Post by josephg »

judahmeek wrote: post #252
josephg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, triplebyte is dead. That’s one reason not to do the experiment.

Also arguably the “customer” for triplebyte was the company that eventually hires the candidate. They’re paying in part for the screening process triplebyte did. We wouldn’t have been doing our job if we skipped the interview part of the process.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#273

Post by hobs »

stackskipton wrote: post #177
hobs wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its because the person is thinking you are looking for something especially smart when in fact something like a list of lists would be fine enough, if you can explain the tradeoffs for using them. Edit: beaten, yes they were overthinking it.

Yep. Am bad at Dev. Pretty good at making sure Kubernetes cluster doesn't implode though.

I think you are selling yourself short - the problem is just some minor education to realize you probably know most of what you need to know. And I still cant figure out how to get a kube cluster working.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#274

Post by rachofsunshine »

labaron wrote: post #255

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 e…

This was an issue, but less of one than you'd probably think. I estimate that roughly 10% of people we vouched for were cheating. 10% is certainly not zero, and it was occasionally trouble with clients, but 10% also kind of disappears into the general noise of different hiring processes and steps to the point that that estimate could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 in either direction.

There's also the sort of sad statement that even prepping that much puts you far ahead of the average candidate. We TOLD candidates what to expect (and we do at Otherbranch, too) and the overwhelming majority do not even read that, which requires no active searching, no moral compromise, and no pre-knowledge of our process.

Triplebyte did, late in the history of FastTrack, start rotating problems a bit to address that problem.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#277

Post by jimberlage »

wging wrote: post #247
cbanek wrote: post #51

I feel like they didn't cover one of the massive losses of confidence in TripleByte, which was when they opened up their database of candidates and did not really warn people ahead of time. I'm struggling to remember all the details, but I feel this happened a few years ago and really pissed off the HN community and a lot of people scrambled to hide the fact they screened with TripleByte. I feel like as an outside us…

It's not covered extensively in the article, but it was alluded to at one point via the phrase "pissed them off with anti-privacy decisions". (In context, 'them' refers to the engineering side of Triplebyte's user base.)

Anti-privacy can mean "we accidentally leaked that you visited facebook.com on Nov 15" or "we allowed your employer to see that you're actively job hunting."

I mean technically the same term is OK to use for both, but it does feel like it's burying the lede.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#279

Post by drumdance »

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?

My dad was an airline pilot. To hear him talk he was surrounded by morons.

That said, at least with airplanes you have to put in the flight hours and they have to be documented. Most commercial pilots start off at very low pay doing puddle jumpers and regional jets. Military experience might give you a leg up because it shows you've spent a lot of hours going through a very regimented program.

My dad was fortunate to get in the industry right before it became an option for the masses rather than luxury and business. It was high paying, glamorous job.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#280

Post by bsder »

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…

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