Thanks John Krazam!
Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's still an amazing level of persistence. What motivated you to push through so much failure?
Overconfidence. I had built some cool stuff, but I didn’t know much I didn’t know. So having interviews where I wouldn’t get any feedback left me in the dark about how far off I was. I’ve always had sterling reviews as long as I’ve been in a job. I’ll leave it to you to wonder how much of that is competence and how much is successfully pretending to be competent.
> I’ll leave it to you to wonder how much of that is competence and how much is successfully pretending to be competent.
It still sets a baseline level of competence, even if it’s not quite as amazing as it appears.
People always think I’m competent, but it’s really me just starting on ‘what I expect people to be doing in half a year’ now, so by the time they start doing it I’ve already gone through all the pitfalls while they weren’t looking.
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#83TripleByte changed my (professional) life. Around 2019, I was in a bit of a professional lull but knew just enough coding to be dangerous. I got roped into the TripleByte funnel through a Reddit ad, which eventually culminated in moving out to SF for a YC startup. Several years later, I had a role at FAANG and reached a level of professional $ucce$$ that was orders of magnitude better than where I had been ~4 years p…
I went through a bootcamp at the end of 2014, then spent the next three years unable to get a job in tech. I didn’t have a paycheck for those three years. Triplebyte was my last ditch effort. I failed the online test the first time I took it, came back and then failed their interview. Came back again, got five in person interviews in the Bay Area. Didn’t get offers on the first four (one place even kicked me out half…
> one place even kicked me out halfway through the set of interviews
It might feel better if you realise they "let you go home" rather than "kicked you out". If a candidate is clearly not qualified why waste their time (or ours) going through interviews that we already know won't lead to a hire?
BTW we always consider this a failure of our process (phone screen in particular), not failure of the candidate. We should never have brought them in in the first place.
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#84TripleByte changed my (professional) life. Around 2019, I was in a bit of a professional lull but knew just enough coding to be dangerous. I got roped into the TripleByte funnel through a Reddit ad, which eventually culminated in moving out to SF for a YC startup. Several years later, I had a role at FAANG and reached a level of professional $ucce$$ that was orders of magnitude better than where I had been ~4 years p…
I went through a bootcamp at the end of 2014, then spent the next three years unable to get a job in tech. I didn’t have a paycheck for those three years. Triplebyte was my last ditch effort. I failed the online test the first time I took it, came back and then failed their interview. Came back again, got five in person interviews in the Bay Area. Didn’t get offers on the first four (one place even kicked me out half…
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Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well, okay, but turn it round: what do you have to lose by listing the jobs? Years ago, Triplebyte had a blog post on the front page of this very site where we mentioned, offhandedly, that we'd gotten jobs for "hundreds of engineers". That was true - the number was roughly 800 that we could track, probably into the low thousands counting ones we didn't - but there were extended threads analyzing that number to prov…
Okay, that's a good analysis. I'm too tired to work through the math bit right now, but you may be right. One question in my mind, though, is why is it that that most recruiters solve the coordination issue the other way - first finding companies, and then hunting for candidates to match them. IE, there must be some reason why it's more effective for them to do it that way round, and theoretically this presents an ob…
As the previous blog post[1] was all about, they're not really expecting to scale, right? Or not that far.
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#86Glad to see you back. Signed up, and unlike when I was using TB in the early days, my resume should hopefully be the kind of thing companies are looking for.
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#87I think you really want to let engineers start attempting problems without manual onboarding. Doesn't cost you much, and gets them the dopamine hit before committing anything? I got job interviews from the original Triplebyte that I almost took just from investigating it as a source to hire engineers!
So the reason we don't do a quiz (I assume that's what you're referring to) is just that GPT makes it way too easy to cheat. GPT would've gotten almost the entirety of the old Triplebyte quiz right. I have thought about having one available just for nerd-sniping growth-hack purposes, for the exact reason you say, but using it as a filter feels like it's just going to select for what is now very easy cheating. (Not th…
Instead of a quiz, you could do a puzzle / clue hunt.
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#88I've been thinking about how we assess software engineering skills, and I'm curious about others' thoughts on using open source contributions as a primary metric.
My hypothesis is that real-world collaboration and communication skills, as demonstrated through open source work, are more indicative of a developer's capabilities than typical coding quizzes. (I tried OtherBranch's sample coding problem mentioned at their post, https://www.otherbranch.com/practice-coding-problem, and got this opinion.) With the rise of AI tools, I believe the ability to effectively use these to enhance one's contributions is becoming increasingly valuable.
For those who hire or work with other developers:
1. How much weight do you give to a candidate's open source contributions?
2. Do you find that strong open source contributors tend to be better collaborators?
3. How do you balance assessing technical skills vs. communication/collaboration abilities?
I'm working on a platform to facilitate this new assessment with personalized LLM support. So I'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts!
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#89Do you hire only software engineers? This page doesn't mention it but it seems like you do based on your sign up page.
https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers
(I am asking because I am more of a data science / research person.)
Re: Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The website[1] (not the blog) looks like it was designed using a Bootstrap theme from 10 years ago. It doesn't inspire confidence about the legitimacy of the business. The post is of a somewhat candid, high-information concentration blog post, by a bootstrapped company... and the stereotypical HN response is to criticize them for not using the latest purely stylistic glossy marketing brochure Webrogrammer resume ke…
It looks like they don’t have a designer, which is a smell for sure if you were looking for some indication of how serious the place is. It’s not the choice of framework that makes the difference, it’s the fact that it looks like it was made by 1 lone engineer who is doing their best, but still isn’t a designer.
Personally, I'm an old school, social mis-fit geek ..
So I actually prefer something a bit quirky/less glossy as long as the information is there.. For some reason that feels more 'human' and 'honest' then some bland,shiny PR firm crud that is solely focused on 'conversions' (signups).
But to each his own I guess....